3 ms·

I have two, at least. 1. Personal names are not generic strings, any more than Dates are numbers or Money is a floating point value. Name, as in a person's giv

I have two, at least. 1. Personal names are not generic strings, any more than Dates are numbers or Money is a floating point value. Name, as in a person's given and family name, or whatever, should be a type in every standard library, with behaviors appropriate for the semantics of a Name, language, and country. Yes there are lots of conflicting international differences. We've managed to handle languages and calendars of significant complexity, we can do so sufficiently well for the things we use to identify ourselves. 2. "AI" is a marketing term for a kind of automation technology able to use pattern matching to reproduce plausible new versions of the data used to train the model's algorithms. It couches this automation as especially powerful or magical as a way to draw a smokescreen around the real problems and limitations of the technology.

tcbasche 3y ago
I love that first point and I wish it was something that was applied even further to other pieces of data - integers and floats are intended for mathematical operations and so to make database row identifiers integers always seemed strange to me.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  That's a symptom of what's known as Primitive Obsession. Back in the days of programming languages before declaring new abstract data types with either prohibitively expensive (in time and/or memory) it was valid limitation. Today, there's rarely an excuse.
akasakahakada 3y ago
1. Structure of a name depends on that person, not the country or state or ethnicity. Whatever standards you make, it won't fit.
- cratermoon 3y ago
  So taking a name and applying the reverse() operation on it yields a name? You can concatenate the names of two people together and that becomes a valid identifier for the two-person tuple? Strings have behaviors that names don't, and names have domain-specific meaning that strings don't. An entire class of bugs can be eliminated if we stop treating people's names as sequences of characters enclosed in quotes.

tcbasche 3y ago

I love that first point and I wish it was something that was applied even further to other pieces of data - integers and floats are intended for mathematical operations and so to make database row identifiers integers always seemed strange to me.

cratermoon 3y ago
That's a symptom of what's known as Primitive Obsession. Back in the days of programming languages before declaring new abstract data types with either prohibitively expensive (in time and/or memory) it was valid limitation. Today, there's rarely an excuse.

akasakahakada 3y ago

1. Structure of a name depends on that person, not the country or state or ethnicity. Whatever standards you make, it won't fit.

cratermoon 3y ago
So taking a name and applying the reverse() operation on it yields a name? You can concatenate the names of two people together and that becomes a valid identifier for the two-person tuple? Strings have behaviors that names don't, and names have domain-specific meaning that strings don't. An entire class of bugs can be eliminated if we stop treating people's names as sequences of characters enclosed in quotes.