[EDIT] I was confusing text files and files. I'll keep the post there, and I can move or remove it as well.

<h3>Web</h3>

In 'everything is a file' I first saw configuration files and file descriptors (I mean like /dev/*). But I forgot about how some files are inacccessible, like webpages that must be parsed to reveal their content, and the other files related to this one (css, js, assets, but also other pages...).

Aaron Swartz brought the fun back with html source and made this: https://github.com/aaronsw/html2text

<h3>config.h</h3>

There are some software written in C that use a config.h file for their configuration. That makes configuration easy for the developper, and the software light, but once compiled, the configuration is not a text file anymore, it is part of the software. So if the software is provided as a binary package, there is no way to edit the configuration. That is why I think source distribution are a step furnther toward EIAF.

<h3>Lisp philosophy</h3>

A sibling approach I discovered with Emacs is "everything is code", (and code as data): All information is stored as lisp code files, with a vertical integration, permitting to get information of every node of the system interactively: key being pressed, function being executed, element under cursor, processes, buffer....
And for all of those, the followings are available in three or four keystrokes:
- Documentation: often from docstrings (automatically formatted and grammar-checked while writing them);
- Corresponding source code;
- States and return values;
- Live debuging like for http://www.pythontutor.com/visualize.html

Then as _everything_ can be obtained by calling a function, there is no need for any text file anymore, and no need to ever parse anything: Just call one function with some argument and you have your value. At the time of lisp machines, the whole system could be passed through the debugger.

On the other hand, this require the system information to always be accessed through a running lisp instance populating all the variables, raising the minimal complexity required to run a system. And it is not flexible to anything else than lisp. For this, text files are needed.