"everything is a file" is unix's equivalent of the Greek's "everything is a basic geometric shape" and epicycles, or heck, "everything is an object". These kinds of reductions are naive and result in kludges of representation.
> These kinds of reductions are naive and result in kludges of representation.
I've spent a lot of time with these 'kludges' as well as all of the alternatives available and I far prefer the kludges. They make working with resources remote or local a breeze, they allow the same software to work with a COM port or a SCSI channel, they allow for all kinds of abstractions and get rid of an enormous amount of cruft in code to special case each and every device under the sun.
The 'Unix' version of that statement is the one that is kludgy, I'll give you that. But I was looking well beyond Unix, see TFA.
