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Once I was working in a piece of software that handled people's names. The client wanted exactly a first name and a last name for every person in the database.
by pteraspidomorph 7y ago
Once I was working in a piece of software that handled people's names. The client wanted exactly a first name and a last name for every person in the database. I tried to explain why that could be a problem, but they weren't interested. It isn't necessarily the programmer's fault.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoTBH, I disagree with most of the points in this article, or least the implied idea that a particular piece of software needs to handle every permutation of how someone wants to be addressed. I'm pretty sure most US legal documents required some form of given name and some form of family name. If you're trying to interface with as US government system, and that's your primary use case, a single first and last name will probably suffice (assuming it's not too arbitrarily short, people can change their name, etc.)
- rovr138 7y agoI’m from the US. My legal name since birth is not 1 word nor my last name. My first name also includes an é. My birth certificate has all of these as well as my passport. My drivers license doesn’t have the é. Truncating my name is how I get mail from people states away who have never lived here. One of them being my dad. He’s never lived in this state so it’s not due to an old address. That’s also how I commit felonies by opening those letters thinking their for me.
- hn_throwaway_99 7y agoSpaces and é can easily be represented in a single DB column, and none of what you wrote precludes having a single "first name" and "last name" field to represent your name in a DB.