[bayareanative]

Files are too finite, low-level and lose generate/parsing knowledge that is implemented N times in N places. OSes should read and write message-oriented streams of records (pb, capnp or similar.) that are invisible to the user, while tools and code see data and data structures. This solves many problems of unnecessary and repeated effort parsing log files, log file rotation, proprietary file formats, portability, compatibility and extensibility.

Also, programs should be able to dynamically-serve the contents of "files" as well with an "activation symlink", i.e.,

    /etc/resolv ->* resolvconf

The "the everything must be plain text" refrain is obsolete and unnecessary because it's trivial to serialize anything to any format since it would already be an universally-supported data structure both in tools and code.

It's not 1978 anymore.

[RcouF1uZ4gsC]

Sounds a lot like WinFS https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WinFS