This thread has me wondering.... Could it be that Plan 9's "everything is a file" model works extremely well in a narrow band of designs but does not offer much of an advantage for larger scale designs? May be one needs so many other things that the advantage offered by plan 9 gets lost in the noise. Or is it that no one has pushed use of this model hard enough for things like browsers, compilers and such? And may be what is needed are Plan 9 analogues of books like The Unix Programming Environment, The Unix Network Programming, The Haskell School of Expression, Design Patterns, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs and so on? Or may be its way is most suited for some future where computers as public transport for a variety of unrelated programs are a thing of the past?