Oh and Poettering should be reminded that printers can show up as files under /dev (never mind that a basic printer is pretty much a teletype, aka tty, without the keyboard).
Damn it, you could do sound by cat pcm to /dev/dsp even.
Every response he gives in this article solidifies him as a architecture astronaut.
I'm actually OK with the possibility of getting away from "everything is a file". Although I still think that's a good starting point and should probably be the default case for most things.
Where I am not a fan of systemd is the extent to which it violates the single responsibility idea. That is, it does too many different things, and it's basically a monolith. Make it easy to substitute alternative implementations of logging and the like, and I wouldn't necessarily object to it.
I actually much prefer going all the way with everything-is-a-file; when Poettering tried to claim that his printer is not a file, I really wonder if a) he's even heard of Plan 9 b) he knows about PostScript.
Where I'm not a fan of systemd is that it's all written in C, instead of a higher-level, safer language, and that we're getting to a point where systemd-terminal, systemd-browser and systemd-nano aren't a joke but mandatory.
All he sees is a nice pile of drivers to bootstrap whatever computing project he wants to get done, and thats it.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9722163
* https://plus.google.com/+LennartPoetteringTheOneAndOnly/post...
