On Fri, 13 Nov 2009 06:16:00 +1100 Jessta <jes...@gmail.com> wrote: > The thing is that human beings don't really work well with lots of > things that are very similar, we get confused. Human beings prefer > things to be similar enough that we can use our previous knowledge to > figure them out but different enough that they aren't easily confused > with other things. > > Unix's 'everything is a file' isn't really true it's more of a guiding > principle than a hard and fast rule and it's more like "everything is > a block or char device" anyway. If you try to shoe-horn everything in > to being a 'file' you end up with some very confusing and unintutitive > behaviour like the OOP crowd and their 'everything is an object'. > > Lisp has the 'everything is a list' problem and there is lots of > behaviour that doesn't fit well in to this. Consistancy can make > things intuitive, but you shouldn't sacrifice intuitiveness for > consistancy. > > - Jessta >
well said. you should always keep the end goal in mind. and "stay confirm to how we've been doing it" should not be a goal. take network interfaces on Linux for example. they have no device file and it makes perfect sense. Dieter
