8 ms·

The original one ( http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b.

The original one ( http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... ) left me bafled. Then I realized you have to strike a balance; otherwise you cannot deal with names at all. The point where drawing the line depends on your industry/customers, but I'd safely say that it's too restrictive nowadays so these lists are useful somewhat and of course they are interesting.

agumonkey 10y ago
Wasn't there one about time and timezones ? So many mundane things have the "how hard can this be" ..
- progval 10y ago
  http://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time http://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-pro...
kibwen 10y ago
It's true that you have to draw a line somewhere based on technical and business constraints, but an important takeaway of the names article is that you almost certainly don't need to do anything with a name other than treat it as an opaque string that can be displayed back to the user. For example, I'm struggling to think of a good reason why user registration would require separate first name and last name fields, and yet this practice is overwhelmingly common. For that matter, why do you want my real name at all, considering that it can't be used as a unique ID anyway?
- Frondo 10y ago
  That's easy, it's to make better marketing materials. "Dear [first name]," flows better than "Dear [opaque string],".
  - kibwen 10y ago
    That's what the marketing department may believe, but in reality that's super creepy. Let's not pretend that I'm on a friendly first-name basis with corporations, or that in reality I'm anything more than an autogenerated numeric ID in a database as far as the corporation is concerned. Furthermore, nobody but my mother calls me by my real first name, and this holds for half of my cohort. And why does any company think that their marketing correspondence is welcome in the first place?
    - mysterypie 10y ago
      > nobody but my mother calls me by my real first name, and this holds for half of my cohort Really? I've been assuming that addressing people by first name--even people you've just met--is now the default, at least for the United States and Canada. Are you in the USA/Canada, by the way? I know that it used to be rude to address someone by their first name unless you knew them well. You had to say, Mr. last-name or Mrs/Ms./Miss last-name. I know this from old movies. But I thought that the etiquette has changed completely: First name is fine and last name sounds rather formal. Do others have a different experience?
      - kibwen 10y ago
        For whatever reason, a large number of the people I know go by names that are not their legal first name. Some go by their middle; some drop letters from their first name in idiosyncratic ways; some keep the same pronunciation but have a different spelling; some change the spelling while leaving the pronunciation and then drop letters; some go by irc nicks even in person; a rare few just invent words that have nothing to do with their names and go by that. Maybe it's a unique symptom of growing up in an era where we communicate via online systems that demand unique usernames?
        nercht12 10y ago
        Could be. If you've heard of someone primarily referred to by their online pseudonym, it may be less awkward calling them that than trying to guess at how they wish to be addressed using their real name. It's still awkward though.
- smallnamespace 10y ago
  But sometimes your government expects names to be broken into given and family names (the US, Japan, and China all seem to make this assumption -- every government form I've seen from those countries wants your name fully broken out). I've no direct experience with, say, Russian or Latin American governments, but cultures that use explicit patronymic or matronymic names might expect that broken out as well. If you ever need to submit user data to the government (e.g. for tax reasons), and you don't ask your user to break the name apart, then you will necessarily be guessing, which seems strictly worse than just asking them how their name might split. At the end of the day, if you operate in a given culture, then you need to address those cultural norms. Bending over backwards to support every possible edge case seems unwise if they also happen to disagree with those norms.
  - kibwen 10y ago
    I'm explicitly disregarding government websites here, since the government has a legitimate reason to care about my full name (and gets to define what a "legal" name means), and also 99% of the websites that I sign up for are unrelated to the government. There's no reason for a social network to report the names of all its users to a government agency automatically, and I'm skeptical that even my bank would have such a requirement.
    - smallnamespace 10y ago
      I don't mean reporting all the names, but for example if you ever transmit payments there is a KYC process, and if you are a bank you must report any suspicious money laundering activity. At the end of the day there are cultural conventions around names, and various agencies use them. I don't see why software should be explicitly culturally neutral, unless your audience is explicitly a global one (and even then, I think localization is preferable to just sticking names into a single field).
      - Thrillington 10y ago
        There is significant engineering cost to implement localization correctly. If you're a bank or in another market where you interact with a government, then you must bear those costs. If not, why not just use an opaque string and spend your engineering dollars on your actual product?
JoshTriplett 10y ago
Yeah, the same applies to many of the falsehoods in this list. Some of them you have to get right; some of them you can probably ignore without causing practical problems.
artpepper 10y ago
What I take from the names article is to make sure you understand your requirements. A blogging platform will have different requirements than, say, electronic medical records.
- nradov 10y ago
  For EMRs, the HL7 FHIR HumanName datatype covers most of what's needed. Patients can have 0 or more names, each of which can have a full string representation plus 0 or more separate family / given / prefix / suffix components. And each name can be tagged with a usage type (official / maiden / nickname / etc) and validity date range. http://www.hl7.org/FHIR/datatypes.html#HumanName http://www.hl7.org/FHIR/datatypes.html#HumanName
  - artpepper 10y ago
    Interesting! Especially the inclusion of a time period field. That's important in time zone information, too.
innocentoldguy 10y ago
People's names is one area I think developers constantly bugger up. For example, my last name has a space in it, but half the websites I register on either: 1. Throw an error and won't let me enter my last name as it is supposed to be spelled. 2. Truncate the last part of my last name. 3. Try to be clever and end up shoving the first half of my last name into a middle-name field. My preference for names, addresses, and other personal data is to stop trying to constrain people to preconceived "standards" and just let them enter their information the way they want it to be.
- sdenton4 10y ago
  I'm a fourth, and occasionally the IV suffix gets horribly mishandled. I recently booked a flight on Travelocity and had to change arrangements by looking up the reservation on the actual airline air, but it turned out they had dropped the space between my last name and the IV, making it impossible for me to log in until I figured out what had gone wrong...
- franciscop 10y ago
  As a Spaniard I have two last names (no middle name, no one last name with space) but 0% of the non-spanish websites I have ever seen accommodate for this. Normally I just use it with an space in the last name field, but then I get exactly the same problems you mention.

agumonkey 10y ago

Wasn't there one about time and timezones ? So many mundane things have the "how hard can this be" ..

progval 10y ago
http://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time http://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-pro...

kibwen 10y ago

It's true that you have to draw a line somewhere based on technical and business constraints, but an important takeaway of the names article is that you almost certainly don't need to do anything with a name other than treat it as an opaque string that can be displayed back to the user. For example, I'm struggling to think of a good reason why user registration would require separate first name and last name fields, and yet this practice is overwhelmingly common. For that matter, why do you want my real name at all, considering that it can't be used as a unique ID anyway?

Frondo 10y ago
That's easy, it's to make better marketing materials. "Dear [first name]," flows better than "Dear [opaque string],".
- kibwen 10y ago
  That's what the marketing department may believe, but in reality that's super creepy. Let's not pretend that I'm on a friendly first-name basis with corporations, or that in reality I'm anything more than an autogenerated numeric ID in a database as far as the corporation is concerned. Furthermore, nobody but my mother calls me by my real first name, and this holds for half of my cohort. And why does any company think that their marketing correspondence is welcome in the first place?
  - mysterypie 10y ago
    > nobody but my mother calls me by my real first name, and this holds for half of my cohort Really? I've been assuming that addressing people by first name--even people you've just met--is now the default, at least for the United States and Canada. Are you in the USA/Canada, by the way? I know that it used to be rude to address someone by their first name unless you knew them well. You had to say, Mr. last-name or Mrs/Ms./Miss last-name. I know this from old movies. But I thought that the etiquette has changed completely: First name is fine and last name sounds rather formal. Do others have a different experience?
    - kibwen 10y ago
      For whatever reason, a large number of the people I know go by names that are not their legal first name. Some go by their middle; some drop letters from their first name in idiosyncratic ways; some keep the same pronunciation but have a different spelling; some change the spelling while leaving the pronunciation and then drop letters; some go by irc nicks even in person; a rare few just invent words that have nothing to do with their names and go by that. Maybe it's a unique symptom of growing up in an era where we communicate via online systems that demand unique usernames?
      - nercht12 10y ago
        Could be. If you've heard of someone primarily referred to by their online pseudonym, it may be less awkward calling them that than trying to guess at how they wish to be addressed using their real name. It's still awkward though.
smallnamespace 10y ago
But sometimes your government expects names to be broken into given and family names (the US, Japan, and China all seem to make this assumption -- every government form I've seen from those countries wants your name fully broken out). I've no direct experience with, say, Russian or Latin American governments, but cultures that use explicit patronymic or matronymic names might expect that broken out as well. If you ever need to submit user data to the government (e.g. for tax reasons), and you don't ask your user to break the name apart, then you will necessarily be guessing, which seems strictly worse than just asking them how their name might split. At the end of the day, if you operate in a given culture, then you need to address those cultural norms. Bending over backwards to support every possible edge case seems unwise if they also happen to disagree with those norms.
- kibwen 10y ago
  I'm explicitly disregarding government websites here, since the government has a legitimate reason to care about my full name (and gets to define what a "legal" name means), and also 99% of the websites that I sign up for are unrelated to the government. There's no reason for a social network to report the names of all its users to a government agency automatically, and I'm skeptical that even my bank would have such a requirement.
  - smallnamespace 10y ago
    I don't mean reporting all the names, but for example if you ever transmit payments there is a KYC process, and if you are a bank you must report any suspicious money laundering activity. At the end of the day there are cultural conventions around names, and various agencies use them. I don't see why software should be explicitly culturally neutral, unless your audience is explicitly a global one (and even then, I think localization is preferable to just sticking names into a single field).
    - Thrillington 10y ago
      There is significant engineering cost to implement localization correctly. If you're a bank or in another market where you interact with a government, then you must bear those costs. If not, why not just use an opaque string and spend your engineering dollars on your actual product?

JoshTriplett 10y ago

Yeah, the same applies to many of the falsehoods in this list. Some of them you have to get right; some of them you can probably ignore without causing practical problems.

artpepper 10y ago

What I take from the names article is to make sure you understand your requirements. A blogging platform will have different requirements than, say, electronic medical records.

nradov 10y ago
For EMRs, the HL7 FHIR HumanName datatype covers most of what's needed. Patients can have 0 or more names, each of which can have a full string representation plus 0 or more separate family / given / prefix / suffix components. And each name can be tagged with a usage type (official / maiden / nickname / etc) and validity date range. http://www.hl7.org/FHIR/datatypes.html#HumanName http://www.hl7.org/FHIR/datatypes.html#HumanName
- artpepper 10y ago
  Interesting! Especially the inclusion of a time period field. That's important in time zone information, too.

innocentoldguy 10y ago

People's names is one area I think developers constantly bugger up. For example, my last name has a space in it, but half the websites I register on either: 1. Throw an error and won't let me enter my last name as it is supposed to be spelled. 2. Truncate the last part of my last name. 3. Try to be clever and end up shoving the first half of my last name into a middle-name field. My preference for names, addresses, and other personal data is to stop trying to constrain people to preconceived "standards" and just let them enter their information the way they want it to be.

sdenton4 10y ago
I'm a fourth, and occasionally the IV suffix gets horribly mishandled. I recently booked a flight on Travelocity and had to change arrangements by looking up the reservation on the actual airline air, but it turned out they had dropped the space between my last name and the IV, making it impossible for me to log in until I figured out what had gone wrong...
franciscop 10y ago
As a Spaniard I have two last names (no middle name, no one last name with space) but 0% of the non-spanish websites I have ever seen accommodate for this. Normally I just use it with an space in the last name field, but then I get exactly the same problems you mention.