Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)
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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)
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Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)
#2I used to date a woman whose hippy mother decided that last names were slavery, she's the person who turned me onto this list. The experience really opened my eyes into the anglo/usa-centric nature of most app development best practices, and how complicated it must be to work as a localization engineer.
She suffered quite a bit, any call to a government agency, especially FASFA student loans (btw fuck you FASFA, fuck you), would often end up in tears after hours of pleading to them she was a real person, or explaining "just freaking search me this way, it's how they did it the last time I spent 2 hours on the phone with you). The only benefit is that having only one name makes it rather difficult to google/facebook stalk you.
tl;dr: Not everybody has a name like yours. Don't use "first name", "last name" for somebody's name. Just give it a 512-byte or larger UTF8 field, and move on.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)
#3I used to date a woman whose hippy mother decided that last names were slavery, she's the person who turned me onto this list. The experience really opened my eyes into the anglo/usa-centric nature of most app development best practices, and how complicated it must be to work as a localization engineer. She suffered quite a bit, any call to a government agency, especially FASFA student loans (btw fuck you FASFA, fuck…
I do when I can get away with it.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)
#4I would functionally disagree with 40 - by the time someone is in a position to be referenced by a computer, they'll have some way of being referred to, even if it's just a number. It's hard to imagine a truly nameless slave that is kept off the grid, yet still has a computerised individual reference somewhere...
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)
#5Previous discussions on HN:
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438472 (138 comments)
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10255610 (11 comments)
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)
#6I have a friend who's a refugee from Afghanistan. Apparently they don't use surnames there (or at least his tribe doesn't). When he applied for a visa my city council shifted his first name to his last name and he had to come up with a first name on the spot. His name is officially Peter Abdullah now.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)
#7I would functionally disagree with 40 - by the time someone is in a position to be referenced by a computer, they'll have some way of being referred to, even if it's just a number. It's hard to imagine a truly nameless slave that is kept off the grid, yet still has a computerised individual reference somewhere...
One could change #40 to: You need your customers' names. I look at a name the same way I look at a username, more frequently than not it's a hassle you don't need to solve. In many applications a username, or even better, an email address, is the best UUID for a user.
We design apps to collect names by default, even when we don't need them and will never use them for any purpose, or at worse, the purpose we use them for is violation of privacy.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)
#8I have a friend who's a refugee from Afghanistan. Apparently they don't use surnames there (or at least his tribe doesn't). When he applied for a visa my city council shifted his first name to his last name and he had to come up with a first name on the spot. His name is officially Peter Abdullah now.
Immigrant officials at Ellis Island used to give people last names based on their father's first name, or the name of the city they come from.
Also, Armenians didn't have last names until recently, so you'll meet lots of people with names like "Gevork Gevorkian" or "Ohan Ohanesian", or their name will be shifted to the right, adding an "ian" to the end (think the prefixed O' in irish names), and give them anglicized names.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)
#9I would functionally disagree with 40 - by the time someone is in a position to be referenced by a computer, they'll have some way of being referred to, even if it's just a number. It's hard to imagine a truly nameless slave that is kept off the grid, yet still has a computerised individual reference somewhere...
One could change #40 to: You need your customers' names. I look at a name the same way I look at a username, more frequently than not it's a hassle you don't need to solve. In many applications a username, or even better, an email address, is the best UUID for a user. We design apps to collect names by default, even when we don't need them and will never use them for any purpose, or at worse, the purpose we use them…
Suppose someone calls in and tells you they want to cancel but forgot which email address they used for signup, what is the next piece of information you ask them?
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)
#10I used to date a woman whose hippy mother decided that last names were slavery, she's the person who turned me onto this list. The experience really opened my eyes into the anglo/usa-centric nature of most app development best practices, and how complicated it must be to work as a localization engineer. She suffered quite a bit, any call to a government agency, especially FASFA student loans (btw fuck you FASFA, fuck…
Tangentially, I'm always slightly uncertain about what to put when asked about my "first name" on official forms. While I have a first name it is not and has never been the name anybody has used for me. I've always gone by my second name, and if you where to ask for me by my first name no one would know whom you are talking about.
Basically do you want the the string returned by name.split()[0] or do you want the string which is the most commonly used identifier for me?