"The separation is odd anyway, what is the reasoning for wanting to sort by last/family name?" Cultural assumptions that date from before the world being as sm

"The separation is odd anyway, what is the reasoning for wanting to sort by last/family name?" Cultural assumptions that date from before the world being as small as it is, more than anything else. HN is in English, and there's a bias towards stories of people from non-English areas integrating into English-speaking locales (which does not have to be "the US", much broader than that) because that's what gets noticed and told around here. But it flows in all directions and all cultures. I've read plenty of tales of woe of non-Japanese trying to live in Japan and integrate with their legal system and having various woes in the process based around their names not fitting into the legal system. And just like the West slowly gets better about accommodating Eastern names, it slowly gets better the other way around too. It's a generalized culture-mismatch problem. I'll cop to being sort of the opinion that the "Xty-Billion Things Programmers Don't Know About {Names/Time/Addresses}" can end up being overly harsh as they are generally written, but at their core, they do have a point, and while we may read it in English and the examples the articles write about are about our more Western sensibilities impacting a broader world, every culture has that problem and could have their own equivalent documents written in their own language with their own examples (e.g. "not everyone in the world lists their family name first").