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You should interpret "programmers believe" not as literally thinking that this is true, but rather as "some systems are designed as if their programmers believe
by PeterisP 4y ago
You should interpret "programmers believe" not as literally thinking that this is true, but rather as "some systems are designed as if their programmers believed that" - and the latter is very definitely true; "Everyone has exactly one email address" is a very relevant falsehood, because there are systems with this baked in as a fundamental assumption.
- another-dave 4y agoI guess what I was getting at is, the earlier articles that this one riffs on were more along the lines of "don't forget to test these edge cases. If you don't, your system will break when people put in their unusual (but valid!) data". To me, someone baking in "one email address per user" or "no numeric/symbols" feels different — they're not being caught out by tricky real-world data that they forgot to consider, they're just deliberately cutting a corner (e.g. our company naming policy is '[firstname][lastname]' so we're not going to bother supporting numeric input in the intranet input field).