mv old-file new-file
So the question is whether you will favor naturalness on the command line or in the GUI. It's no surprise that a Unix build tool favors the command line.
Then this problem goes away entirely and you instead have the problem of not being allowed to have "this_file" and "this file" in the same directory. A problem which probably doesn't matter.
The words and sentences are inside the file. The filenames are identifiers to the files. Identifiers' purpose is mainly to identify, rather than to communicate.
On the other hand, we could imagine a user interface that users don't see (actual) filenames at all.
The identifier assigned to me at birth contains two spaces. Most people use one of the shorthand forms, but still.
That is, I think it is safe to say that we expect we can include spaces in the names of things. The movie is named "Star Wars", after all. That seems natural.
For people, though, we have grown used to someone having multiple parts of their name separated by a space. If given out of order, a comma.
Even in the "naming things" category. We are used to having to put quotes around names that have spaces. Or otherwise using a convention like Capitalized Identifiers to show something goes together. Probably isn't a clearcut rule.
No. But my name does.
> For people, though, we have grown used to someone having multiple parts of their name separated by a space. If given out of order, a comma.
https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...
And I wasn't saying this isn't allowed. What we are used to is not the total of what is allowed. The fringes are full of mistakes, though. At some point, you make a statistical choice.
But to use that as evidence of why spaces should not be supported in filenames is putting the cart before the horse. The goal of software is not to perpetuate whatever mistakes have been made in the past. It's to solve problems for human beings.
And human beings have been using spaces to delimit words since long before computers existed.