In Unix everything is a file which makes allows simple, reusable tools like

ls

,

cd

,

cat

, etc to be used across the whole system. However, files have their drawbacks as well: primarily that they're difficult to merge or detect changes which is useful for syncing, collaborating, and/or subscribing to data. Has anyone seen any alternatives to this paradigm? My startup is currently exploring the idea of append-only logs as our core primitive instead of files. We're not building a new kernel but we're attempting to create a new programming environment with collaboration and reactivity as core tenants. Would love to hear other perspectives on the subject!

@Matthew Linkous some of this thread is likely relevant to you: https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C5T9GPWFL/p1636714161079200

Ah yes Smalltalk is a great example. Having the file not be the single source of truth but instead an optional artifact of your program is an interesting concept.

Unclear to me what you mean by <<log>> here. If you are thinking of building interactive, interpreted environment then the static flat file model/metaphor is only going to make it an upstream battle. You can image an message based system like Smalltalk, or an actor one as in the Carl Hewitt sense (in your mouse example, you can have each mouse be an actor sending a message to some hardware manager actor, no need to files or logs of any kind) or you can come up with another like model or better yet metaphor.

Yeah I see what you mean. I think my concern is around persistence and syncing. So I guess if we think in terms of an actor that is in charge of receiving messages/updates from each mouse actor and then can respond to messages that request the mouse state then the internals whether it's in memory, stored in a SQL DB, file, etc doesn't matter because it's a black box which for the most part is a good thing. However, I'm thinking more in terms of composable data structures. So if you instead think of each mouse as a stream, then to have multiple mice you would just interleave your streams. I.e. I think what I'm getting at is more of building on top of an event-bus rather than addressable messages. Like it decouples the source and the recipient.

I think Nushell represents everything as a table

Yeah I love that idea!

Everything is a file is really "*everything is a number of named bidirection stream of bytes*.[1]" . This is very general and you can build pubssub and basically any protocol on it. Switching to everything is an append only log seems jarringly limiting and underspecified. How could you implement a network adapter over that abstraction? What is the read pattern to these files? Are the contents queryable forever? Where are these files stored? Though in your later chat you seem to be talking about streams, so maybe you have arrived back to where UNIX is already? [1] Linus Torvalds himself corrected it again a bit more precisely: "Everything is a stream of bytes".