I admire Drew Devault's work, but I personally have very different sensibilities on what I consider good software. So this seems to be a case of "Tell me who pr

I admire Drew Devault's work, but I personally have very different sensibilities on what I consider good software. So this seems to be a case of "Tell me who praises you, and I'll tell you what your mistake is" ;-) "Everything is a file" is a nice idea, but we almost have that in Unix, and it is something that can be emulated perfectly in a programming language or a library. There is no need for the low level stuff to be neat. It has to be performant, secure, and support my hardware. Everything else can - and I think should - be built as abstractions on top. That I can basically run the same applications on macOS, Linux, and Windows shows that it is possible and works well. One thing where Plan 9 is lacking IMHO is in the GUI department. ACME is novel but where are the really new radical (G)UI concepts? I wonder what we would have got if BeOS or Longhorn would have been successful. Both played with the idea that the filesystem is a database. Your file system browser morphs into a mail client, a MP3 player, a photo browser depending on the circumstances. You don't deal with "video files" anymore but "episodes", for example. And I think it is not really a technical but a UX challenge to make something like that work well. I hope that people start experimenting with that stuff again!