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> But some cultures and individuals get ridiculous. I'm not allocating 400 characters of space in a standard name field just because you want to include your fa
by king_jester 13y ago
> But some cultures and individuals get ridiculous. I'm not allocating 400 characters of space in a standard name field just because you want to include your family tree, PGP key, DNA sequence and homeland geology in your name. (I will put this in another table, and link it relationally so the software and the people can access your true name.)
This attitude boils down to "I write software that is easy for me to write, not easy for you to use." Why should any user want to use the software a developer that is hostile to their existence?
- claudius 13y agoThe key is obviously to make some trade-off between usability and difficulty during creation. If the software is never finished because running test cases with 10e10 chars-long names takes too long, users won’t even be given the choice of not using it. That said, I’d love to have my PGP fingerprint on my ID :)
- xradionut 13y agoI've a more detailed comment below, but the issue isn't new databases per se, but the huge number of legacy systems out in the world. I have no control of those, I end up building software that has to work with them and help the users and their clients. You deal with questionable quality data that comes from hundreds of different systems running software that may be decades old with demographics from around the world that may have no common conventions. And you fight for the extra disc space and processors to handle an extra hundred characters per record, because with a huge number of records, even that may cause issue with storage, backups and time to process. And yes, I have to write code to deal with all of the "Little Bobby Tables", too.