Plan9 (and Inferno, the virtualised descendent thereof) embody a single, unifying abstraction: that everything is a file. This often stated in Unix but (beyond

Plan9 (and Inferno, the virtualised descendent thereof) embody a single, unifying abstraction: that everything is a file. This often stated in Unix but (beyond the /dev and on Linux /proc & /sys filesystems) there’s lots of things that aren’t files (the framebuffer, network sockets...). In Plan9 and Inferno if you want to do something to anything all you need to do is know fopen & company.