Contrary to the many other "falsehoods programmers believe" articles, this has a strong caveat about domain restrictions. (What I'm saying is probably an insta

Contrary to the many other "falsehoods programmers believe" articles, this has a strong caveat about domain restrictions. (What I'm saying is probably an instance of #29, "Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly accepted standard for names.") E.g. if I'm writing tax software for a particular country, it is plausible to rely on an assumption that people have exactly one canonical full name (#1) in a specific format of names (#5) written in a specific character set (#10), because the names have to match a particular single source of truth (gov't registry), and the criteria for names in that registry is mandated by law. Yes, people coming from other countries (#24,25,26,27) may have different naming schemes, however, the same law prescribes how the names of the different languages shall be mangled to fit in the single commonly accepted standard, and that (mangled) version is legally mandated as de facto canonical name in all the related systems. That does come with the caveat of #38 "Two different systems containing data about the same person will use the same name for that person" and #2 "People have exactly one full name which they go by" as that person may use some other name in common life and other documents. So my point is that names are essentially an arbitrary social/legal construct that can be (and often are!) made to fit arbitrary restrictions.