As far as I can understand, this was exactly the problem that Plan9 tried to fix. UNIX had started from the concept of "everything is a file", but then as new t

As far as I can understand, this was exactly the problem that Plan9 tried to fix. UNIX had started from the concept of "everything is a file", but then as new things got added, those didn't follow the philosophy. Plan9 was an attempt at a fresh start where such non-UNIXisms could be moved back to files.