I'll give you a practical example: Since the RaspberryPi doesn't have a real time clock, I bought a GPS module from adafruit, hooked it up to the Pi's serial line, and ran this two line script to start using it.
aux/gpsfs -b 9600
aux/timesync -G
gpsfs reads data stream from an NMEA compatible GPS device and provides four synthetic files: position, time, satellites and raw. timesync then uses the time file to synchronize local time to GPS. I can read the satellites files to see which GPS satellites were seen where and their SNR etc. The entire gpsfs program is under 1200 lines of C. The point being, it is fairly easy to provide such an interface for new devices. Since it is "just" a filesystem, standard systems tools can be used with them -- you don't have to teach them new tricks. Not everything fits in this paradigm but a surprisingly large number of things do.
Simplicity is a virtue only if you take it seriously.
Someone else mentioned that plan9 features are steadily being added to Linux but that misses the point entirely. Adding a set of simple features to a complex system makes the system even more complex as now you have even more things that can go wrong.
aux/gpsfs -b 9600
aux/timesync -G
gpsfs reads data stream from an NMEA compatible GPS device and provides four synthetic files: position, time, satellites and raw. timesync then uses the time file to synchronize local time to GPS. I can read the satellites files to see which GPS satellites were seen where and their SNR etc. The entire gpsfs program is under 1200 lines of C. The point being, it is fairly easy to provide such an interface for new devices. Since it is "just" a filesystem, standard systems tools can be used with them -- you don't have to teach them new tricks. Not everything fits in this paradigm but a surprisingly large number of things do.
Simplicity is a virtue only if you take it seriously.
Someone else mentioned that plan9 features are steadily being added to Linux but that misses the point entirely. Adding a set of simple features to a complex system makes the system even more complex as now you have even more things that can go wrong.