Thanks for the reference. A quick glance over that paper suggests they have a powerful capability system which tied with the objects provides the necessary abst

Thanks for the reference. A quick glance over that paper suggests they have a powerful capability system which tied with the objects provides the necessary abstraction. As such page objects themselves don't provide any benefits. In that sense files can also be thought of objects with a set of methods (walk, open, read, write, close etc). The only difference being their object collection is graph while filesystem is a tree. Historically unix systems have very weak capability system; there are research operating systems which try to address this but you don't need to get rid of the filesystem/file as an abstraction. I have played with image based programming environements(pharo, CL) in the past; i am not sure how well they will inter-operate with programs written in other languages that don't share the same semantics.