What is a folder(or directory, we’ll call them folders)? Is it a set of locations where files are stored? Absolutely not. A folder is a data structure containing references to files and other folders. But more succinctly, they represent namespaces.

The nomenclature is frankly awful, and totally misleading. By grasping for some physical analog, a very false equivalence has been drawn here, and every computer user has been hamstrung from the get-go as a result. People are not incapable of comprehending namespaces. Plenty of applications use tags these days, and many of those applications support nested tags.

Categories, namespaces, tags- they’re not difficult concepts, they’re just not pervasive. Please spread the word.