[jdthomas]

The HUGE advantage of "everything is a file" is that if you make a tool that works on one "thing" and then want to use it on another "thing" it is quit possible that it will just work. For instance, on OSX, one of the things I sorely miss is the sysfs from Linux. Sure, OSX has the ioreg, but I cannot use the tools I am used to (find, grep, cat, echo, sed, awk, ...).

To put it in terms the web programmers can understand, it is like REST, you have a GET (read), and a POST (write), and I suppose a DELETE (unlink), and with that you can implement all you need. Everything fits into a very few syscalls (open, read, write, close).