And this is the best counter example why not having files/filesystem would suck. You could not do this rather simple calculation at all.
Somehow this crusade against files and the filesystem just feels like it has ulterior motives behind it. I have yet to see even a computer illiterate user who has a hard time understanding "folder" metaphor and that folder may have items inside them, including other folders.
If some files are archives (or any encapsulation format/mechanism), then the count is false.
Files and folders are too generic and not generic enough.
Some files aren't files, some files are ~folders. Actually most of those files are ~folders, they are containers for other kind of data and relationships. List of samples, Tree of names, Graph of points.
IIRC Plan9 tried to be a little more generic (in a good way), you could read/write/list anything even visual objects with one single mechanism.
We need maps to see/categorize/find data. Graphs of atoms that you can close (as in closure, any datum involved in the meaning of an operation has to be included) to transmit them in a consistent state. Moving files is wrong and everybody have seen it, it's full of hardcoded context.
Just today I worked with Markdown, LaTeX, PDF, Postscript, SVG, Python, GIF, and HTML. Most of that was in some way or another related to the Master's thesis I'm working on, but it's honestly pretty typical. (The HTML was not -- I decided to curl some spam sites linked from my email and read through their JavaScript, to trace down and see what sorts of deliciously painful exploits they were trying to install -- turned out it was just advertising crap.)
