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I was reading Eric Raymond's the Art of Unix Programming, (Amazon and online) and at the very beginning of the book where he analyses what Unix does wrong he says:

Having a file system at all may have been the wrong choice.

So I am asking: What could be a viable alternative to file systems? Because Unix was built upon (and therefore heavily utilises the concept of) file descriptors and file systems.

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AoUP is a book of philosophy. That is to say, it is a book full of opinions presented as Absolute Truth. There are even several places where it is objectively wrong. Still, it is a valuable read, if only to challenge your own opinions and thereby harden and shape them. –  Warren Young Oct 31 '12 at 15:30
    
@WarrenYoung I believe that anything someone reads can be of some value. This book (so far) is not so technical and has some very good ideas in it. –  NlightNFotis Oct 31 '12 at 15:32

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After further research on the matter, the author of the book clarifies this later in his book. It was just that the analysis on the matter is way later than what I am reading now. To satisfy future reader's thirst for knowledge, the author is quoted:

Was having a file system at all the wrong thing?

Since the late 1970s there has been an intriguing history of research into persistent object stores and operating systems that don't have a shared global file system at all, but rather treat disk storage as a huge swap area and do everything through virtualized object pointers.

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What do you mean by "virtualized object pointers" ? –  ps06756 Oct 30 '14 at 7:07

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