The time has come to replace file systems
What this boils down to is that he thinks a flat namespace (tags) offers advantages over hierarchical namespaces (tree).  They really don&#x27;t.  Once your tag space grows you will start to struggle with naming, and path-like structures (nested namespaces) start to creep back in.  And you are right where you started: paths.<p>The treatment of immutability is too superficial to make any sense of so I don&#x27;t know what the author is imagining. Ted Nelson has evolved some ideas on this for decades that might be worth knowing about. Some of which have kind of come to pass (if you squint and look at how non-destructive editing tools for video and audio work, for instance).  However, very little of Ted&#x27;s thinking has ever been burdened by usable implementation.<p>The concept of having multiple references to the same file already exists.  So what he proposes can be realized with existing file systems just by introducing a different naming scheme and making extensive use of sym-&#x2F;hard-linking.<p>Yes, a lot of file systems will have terrible lookup and traversal performance, but that problem exists in an orthogonal universe and can be solved. Is, indeed solved, in some fileystems if the marketing blurb doesn&#x27;t lie.<p>If you think about how you would realize this using existing filesystems, by organizing them differently, the concept isn&#x27;t as sexy anymore. Because it doesn&#x27;t really involve a lot of new stuff and you start to see the inconvenience of having to cope with both novelty and problems you didn&#x27;t have before.<p>The problems someone like me wants solved in filsystems are entirely different, and aren&#x27;t so much about filesystems as it is about how you make the functionality useful to applications.<p>For instance, there are filesystems that offer snapshot semantics.  Including COW-snapshots. This would be useful whenever applications need to do be able to roll back changes, switch between states, do backups while being live etc.  Yet I know of no language which has snapshot as part of the standard OS interface.  So people generally don&#x27;t write application that take full advantage of what the underlying system offers.