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Comment by sturadnidge | Hacker News Reader

Yes, because the potential to break administrative scripts is a far more important consideration than the usability of a system for the average person.

I agree with the most of the points in the article, but the one regarding spaces is, IMHO, ridiculous.

EDIT: Just to be clear, I don't use (or care that much about) spaces in file names. I am talking about the vast majority of non-technical users.

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Assuming the coworker was a technical user I think it is correct to tell him to stop using spaces. No reason to make life harder for the team members just because you happen to like spaces.

Personally I think spaces and UNIX shells is a mess, but I am not sure what would have been a better solution.

You wouldn't like Plan 9 then; it wisely took the decision to forbid spaces (U+20) in file names at the kernel level.

It has nothing to do with liking or not liking spaces per se, but simply that you should support the features that the operating system allows. Look I hate spaces (and non-ASCII characters for that matter) in files names as much as the next programmer who's ever had his code fail due to them, but if I'm writing for a platform that supports them, then I try my best to deal with them, and tread any failure in handling them as a bug that should be fixed.

Just a small correction. While nobody uses spaces in file names in Plan 9, and at least in Inferno #U changes spaces to something else, spaces are not forbidden in the kernel since March 23th, 1999: http://swtch.com/cgi-bin/plan9history.cgi?f=1999/0323/port/c...

Thanks, I think you've corrected me on this before and I haven't learned! My Plan 9 comes from before this switch.

I don't care about it - I'm saying the people who use operating systems (as opposed to the people who administer them) do.

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