> If you went to a software engineering design review meeting, proposing that several different kinds of objects representing everything from files, network soc

> If you went to a software engineering design review meeting, proposing that several different kinds of objects representing everything from files, network sockets, to arbitrary devices should all use the interface above, you’d be laughed out of the room. You're describing a meeting in which people seem unaware of the purpose of uniform interfaces. Not sure we could call such a meeting "engineering design" meeting, because engineers tend to know better. If I went up and proposed the same interface for all cables, displays, mice, keyboards, speakers, hard drives, phones... and called it USB, would I also be laughed out of the room? There's no benefit to reinventing open/close/read/write in 50 different ways. The goal is to do it once, and then build more complex interfaces on top of it. That is, unless you're paid by the number of lines of code you write.