How to soft-wrap long text with no spaces? [SOLVED]

[richmond62]

Unless of course there's something special about American students?

Indeed: they are just as goofy as students the world over. LOL

I was over the road in the University the other day (taking my wife some sandwiches), when a student who I vaguely know
said, "Come and look at what I've got." and showed me her laptop, and I said, "Congratulations, you have a laptop." (as one does
round these parts), and she then told me that laptops were invented 10 years ago, and before that everybody used those clunky
things under the desk one kept kicking.

This young lady is 23; so where was she when she was 13? Not, as far as I know, living in a cave in the mountains: after all,
she came to ESL classes in my school and must have seen my laptop I had then (now having a second life with the cleaning lady).

There's a bloke at the market down the road (a very, very switched on gypsy bloke) who told me he'd had a great idea to sell
horse blinkers to Uni students to help them study, but then realised that as they were 95% of them were entirely blinkered
already to the realities of day-to-day life. He and I crack open a can of beer together from time to time and he thrashes the
pants off me at backgammon.

[FourthWorld]

I call bullish*t.
Or more accurately, I call clickbait...
...
The gist is 'look at these kids, they can't even find files and folders, they victims of a different computer paradigm because that's all these youngsters know'.
I'm not sure where you see the 'reasonable case', perhaps you have specific experiences that I don't

Perhaps the presumption of generalized applicability from specific anecdotal data may be the issue all around.

In her article, published as it was in a lay venue outside of peer review, Ms Chin cited about half a dozen professors in fields from engineering to journalism and law who claim to have similar experiences. Given that many of the leading designers of such systems have been discussing their intentions for that exact outcome, it didn't occur to me that this might be offensive or seen as "clickbait".

If you believe she's making stuff up for the sake of unearned ad revenue, she provides her Twitter link as contact:
https://twitter.com/mcsquared96

If you decide to take up your concerns with her please let us know the outcome.

My personal take isn't that human cognition has somehow devolved to the point that our species has lost the capacity for managing the manual tedium of file systems, but that's it's merely less interesting.

When PCs were first a thing it was common for PC owners to learn programming. Today even professional programmers rarely run a compiler or even have any reason to need to know how. The recent resurgent interest in visual programming allows many to build applications without even typing. What people find interesting to devote their attention to changes over time, and many skillsets atrophy after sufficient disuse.

Whether this contributes to any widespread trend of atrophied habits in specific task areas with specific demographics is something I'll happily leave to those who find that intersection of details interesting enough to study.

The only reason any of this discussion appears in this thread at all stems from a question of UI design priorities, in an operating system that, unlike its geekier counterpart Linux, rarely bothers to show a file object's full path to the end-user.

[stam]

Richard.

I can only express opinions based on my observations. Much like the author, I have not done a scientific assessment of students' abilities to leverage the concept of folders.

But I will say:
- In my personal experience, on the whole users are no more incapable than they were 20 years ago. Admittedly that does not say much.
- I work in one of the largest university hospitals in the UK and I have seen no correlate of this type of technical incompetence in undergraduates (in the UK).
As such, to me the article comes across as pretentious, attention grabbing - if well written - fiction.

Regarding your sarcastic remark suggesting the author is making money off this and suggesting I contact her on twitter - that's cute. But I was implying that the site profits. Not the author. I surely shouldn't have to point this out?
Unless you're suggesting that the author profits directly from the Verge's advertising?
On that note, a similar concern was raised in comments on the Verge, but remains unanswered.


The article is not based in any factual data, it's an opinion piece based on what is essentially 'hearsay' at best. It is deliberately attention grabbing - the tagline reads:

A generation that grew up with Google is forcing professors to rethink their lesson plans

This is akin to "you'll never guess what happened next".

I come into contact with hundreds of under- and postgraduate students and the only change I've noticed is that students are much more demanding in in their IT requirements and when there is an IT issue they are the first to come up with IT solutions - and this is a notable trend over the years in my personal experience.

The attitude of students has changed dramatically over the years as 'gen z' has come in and it's not all good, but I'm sure that's what yesteryear's professors said about me when I was an undergraduate. But the described difficulty is not amongst their many issues.
We are actually seeing an increase in demand for video courses in R, Python and the like - it's bizarre to suggest that the same generation of students can't manage the concept of folders.

Needless to say, none of our professors has had to 'rethink' their lesson plans to accommodate the 'generation that grew up with google'. Well, other than having to provide better courses on R, python, machine learning and so on.

Clearly you feel this article is reporting veracity and I don't. Maybe just leave it at that.

[stam]

Unless of course there's something special about American students?

Indeed: they are just as goofy as students the world over. LOL

Just to clarify (in case it really needed a clarification) - that comment was sarcasm.
I of course do not think US students are different in any real way to UK students.

My point was that, based on my own experience - which is as unscientific as the author's of this article - I see no such trend in the UK. Quite the opposite.
I was recently made aware that a python video course produced by the university I'm affiliated with, which was for the students across all disciplines, was so wildly successful that it's going to be sold as commercial product by the university - the people that made it successful are the students.

To suggest that the same generation of students can't understand the concept of folders is ludicrous.

And since I truly believe students are as capable everywhere, given the same opportunities, I also truly believe this article is largely fiction. Perhaps based on a handful of opinions, but still fiction.

A well known problem in publishing medical papers is 'reporting bias'. The vast majority of papers that are published show positive findings (eg treatment abc works). No one wants to submit and no journal wants to pubish papers with negative results (ie treatment xyz didn't work). In the same way, you'll never see an article that states that in spite some misgivings, the vast majority of students do understand what a folder is. But publishing the opposite is attractive to publishers and readers.

If I could be bothered I could just send out a brief questionnaire to our undergraduates to at least assess their self-assessed knowledge on this matter.
But I'm not and I've got about 10,000 other fish to fry...

[richmond62]

And my repost was a peerie bit ironic, forbye.

Qha'd hae thocht that?

And, 'way back when', well 1984, using blind terminals on a mainframe I had quite some difficulty understanding concepts such as directories and root users.

All a bit abstract.

With the advent of GUIs my visual brain had no problem at all.

[stam]

With the advent of GUIs my visual brain had no problem at all.

I’m with you on that
1984 was a magical year. The term ”directory” suddenly went from something you typed DOS in to something that actually made sense

[richmond62]

Possibly: I didn't get to see a GUI until 1993:

on a Macintosh running Mac OS 7, and an Archimedes running RISC OS.

Not forgetting Windows 3.1 that was a sort of half-cock job re GUIs.

[stam]

I was well aware of the Mac since 1985, a much richer cousin bought one and boy was I jealous But I did spend considerable time with it.

I was lucky enough to have a buddy living in the same university dorms as me, who was a student at the Royal Technical University in Stockholm in '86. He got a Mac for his IT studies and it's fair to say we spent most nights, playing games on it. Dark Castle is one I remember fondly

Then he introduced me to their Mac hall in the university with something like 150 Mac plus' networked via ADB. We used to get access at night and spend countless hours playing Maze Wars over the network It took a little longer until I could afford my own - I remember my LC II with a colour screen fondly and bizarrely enough it still works even today! Although it's not really usable for anything than indulging nostalgia.

My friend introduced me to HyperCard sometime in '86 or '87 and basically gave me his Mac plus for days at a time before I could afford my own. I was completely hooked. Windows 3.1 was a frankensteinian abomination in comparison!