Because space is one of the most common characters in many languages, and people want to write stuff with spaces.
> Most users wouldn't notice, and shell scripts authors would be much happier!
They would, because people want to use spaces, and they wouldn't, because there's a bunch of characters you need to quote for (in POSIX sh/bash).
The solution is to realize it's not 1986 and evolve shell scripting beyond that. Fish and zsh have done that. Probably others as well. It's not even that hard and doesn't even need to woefully break compatibility.
Oh, and even if you did somehow convince the Unix world to outlaw spaces and other special shell characters by some super-human feat of charisma, you still haven't really solved anything because there's no way in hell you're going to convince the Windows or macOS people to do that, so you're still going to end up in trouble when your spouse or grandma or boss gives you their USB drive, or sends you files (which you can conveniently no longer store), or whatnot.
Might as well argue for the moon to be painted green. It's just not going to happen.
> Most users wouldn't notice, and shell scripts authors would be much happier!
They would, because people want to use spaces, and they wouldn't, because there's a bunch of characters you need to quote for (in POSIX sh/bash).
The solution is to realize it's not 1986 and evolve shell scripting beyond that. Fish and zsh have done that. Probably others as well. It's not even that hard and doesn't even need to woefully break compatibility.
Oh, and even if you did somehow convince the Unix world to outlaw spaces and other special shell characters by some super-human feat of charisma, you still haven't really solved anything because there's no way in hell you're going to convince the Windows or macOS people to do that, so you're still going to end up in trouble when your spouse or grandma or boss gives you their USB drive, or sends you files (which you can conveniently no longer store), or whatnot.
Might as well argue for the moon to be painted green. It's just not going to happen.