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My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

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Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#101

Post by xenadu02 »

Freak_NL wrote: post #31
tyingq wrote: post #2

I have seen apps that choke on much more common names. Like O'Brian. This post is a classic on various name issues: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

Tangentially related (rule 9); my girlfriend's surname contains an 'é'. I have yet to see a year go by without receiving mail having 'é' on the address label where the é should be. Explanation: echo "é" | iconv -t utf8 -f iso8859-15 We're Dutch, and the é is part of our language, and even part of the legacy character encoding standard everyone used before Unicode's widespread adoption. This is just a matter of code…

> I doubt these issues will go away within even, say, twenty years.

Much like the printing press, I'm 100% certain that the computing (and the internet specifically) is altering human written language across the world.

It is just so much easier to avoid anything outside ASCII because you can be certain ASCII will always work - even though some awful MS Access -> CSV -> SQL -> SQL -> Excel -> SQL -> COBOL ETL pipeline. No matter what version of any software is being used.

Technology has always shaped written language and we should fight to do better but at this point it seems inevitable.

(To be clear: I'm not saying this is a good or desirable state of affairs)

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#102

Post by MattBearman »

DavidWoof wrote: post #6

I've been programming for over a quarter century, and I feel pretty confident that I've never written anything that could confuse 'null' with NULL. I can't even think of a language that would let you easily do this. If web forms aren't accepting NULL, then somebody probably specifically programmed the word 'null' into a filter of disallowed entries. Probably to stop clerks from entering the word 'null' to mean empty…

When using sequel pro with a MySQL database, typing NULL into a string field will make that field null rather than 'null', which always seemed like an odd design choice to me

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#103

Post by l0b0 »

charlieo88 wrote: post #22
tyingq wrote: post #2

I have seen apps that choke on much more common names. Like O'Brian. This post is a classic on various name issues: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

It's not always a computer problem. I have an O' name. There have been many college educated adults I've had to explain the difference between a quote ("), an apostrophe ('), and whatever the hell you call the character under the tilde (`). I kid, it's the grave.

Even more annoying is when you realise that those quotes are a hack because keyboards don't have separate left and right single and double quotation marks. The rabbit hole goes deeper…

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#104

Post by brak1 »

MattBearman wrote: post #102
DavidWoof wrote: post #6

I've been programming for over a quarter century, and I feel pretty confident that I've never written anything that could confuse 'null' with NULL. I can't even think of a language that would let you easily do this. If web forms aren't accepting NULL, then somebody probably specifically programmed the word 'null' into a filter of disallowed entries. Probably to stop clerks from entering the word 'null' to mean empty…

When using sequel pro with a MySQL database, typing NULL into a string field will make that field null rather than 'null', which always seemed like an odd design choice to me

Its a good compromise i think. OTherwise to update a field to null it would need a button or right clicking and selected a null option. I would expect the amount of people who actually want to enter a 'null' string is minimal...

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#105

Post by Grustaf »

pjungwir wrote: post #65
charlieo88 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not always a computer problem. I have an O' name. There have been many college educated adults I've had to explain the difference between a quote ("), an apostrophe ('), and whatever the hell you call the character under the tilde (`). I kid, it's the grave.

If you really want some fun, try explaining to people the difference between modern Greek tonos (e.g. ή, Unicode 03ae) and ancient Greek oxia (e.g. ή, Unicode 1f75). Or in UTF-8: paul@tal:~$ od --format=x1z tmp/tonos-oxia 0000000 74 6f 6e 6f 73 3a 20 ce ae 0a 6f 78 69 61 3a 20 >tonos: ...oxia: .... It's super fun when you are the only tech person in a Classics grad program and everyone else is turning in papers that…

You're not saying the classicists confuse the smooth breathing with the acute accent, right? Only they can't figure out how to typeset them?

How do you enter them nowadays by the way? In the early days of the internet before unicode there were special fonts from SIL for example that first of all were using Latin characters (you'd type W and it would look like Ω) and secondly I think had the diacritics as separate characters, so the font would combine them. It was messy but at least you could type it on a normal keyboard. You could even read it in its ASCII form, most of the hacks were pretty reasonable.

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#106

Post by ygra »

Animats wrote: post #71
Freak_NL wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangentially related (rule 9); my girlfriend's surname contains an 'é'. I have yet to see a year go by without receiving mail having 'é' on the address label where the é should be. Explanation: echo "é" | iconv -t utf8 -f iso8859-15 We're Dutch, and the é is part of our language, and even part of the legacy character encoding standard everyone used before Unicode's widespread adoption. This is just a matter of code…

It's getting much better. Almost everything new is in UTF-8. I've been writing code to clean up a 2013 database dump. The database stored everything in LATIN-1 fields. Not because the data is in LATIN-1, but because LATIN-1 will accept any byte value. This makes error messages during input go away. See this bad advice on Stack Overflow.[1] Some of the data is ASCII. Some is UTF-8. Some is Windows-1252. Some data is n…

Even if something new is UTF-8, you'd basically have to guarantee that it never interfaces with anything old and/or broken to ensure the data survives intact. I've recently received a package where the ö in my name was written as ̦ which I've never seen before. Things go wrong in the most unexpected places and the sad thing is that even if you use UTF-8 for text storage, you still have to know what you can do and how to do it to not mangle it.

There are a lot of Unicode-hostile environments out there. Java is old enough to always require explicit encoding declaration for pretty much any tool ... compiler, documentation generator, etc. Forget it at any one point and you get garbage. Reading or writing text files should always make the encoding explicit, but rarely does so. C#'s string methods all support, but don't require, a Culture parameter, without which you're practically guaranteed to do things like case conversion, or substring searches wrong in the general case. There was an awesome and long answer by tchrist on SO once about what the Perl boilerplate is to properly support Unicode for many or most circumstances (it's complicated and long and I doubt many people are going those lengths).

Point being, even when using something that supports Unicode well, the programmer still has to care, simply because text and language are messy things and it simply isn't possible to have a magic bullet that does everything right.

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#107

Post by ygra »

mark-r wrote: post #79
dsp1234 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent "Programmers use the grave accent symbol as a separate character (i.e., not combined with any letter) for a number of tasks. In this role, it is known as a backquote or backtick."

ASCII never really supported the idea of a combining character, so it's not surprising that the original intent was subverted.

Heck, in some fonts ` even takes the form of ‛ or ‘. Which is probably where typing quotes like ``this'' comes from (which looks absolutely awful nowadays since it mixes an uncombined diacritic with a kludge of a punctuation character).

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#108

Post by tajen »

xenadu02 wrote: post #101
Freak_NL wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tangentially related (rule 9); my girlfriend's surname contains an 'é'. I have yet to see a year go by without receiving mail having 'é' on the address label where the é should be. Explanation: echo "é" | iconv -t utf8 -f iso8859-15 We're Dutch, and the é is part of our language, and even part of the legacy character encoding standard everyone used before Unicode's widespread adoption. This is just a matter of code…

> I doubt these issues will go away within even, say, twenty years. Much like the printing press, I'm 100% certain that the computing (and the internet specifically) is altering human written language across the world. It is just so much easier to avoid anything outside ASCII because you can be certain ASCII will always work - even though some awful MS Access -> CSV -> SQL -> SQL -> Excel -> SQL -> COBOL ETL pipeline…

I wonder what happens if you book an airline ticket as "Miche" instead of "Miché". Will custom/CIA choke on the unmatching name?

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#109

Post by tajen »

lokedhs wrote: post #90
sebtoast wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm French and I see this all the time, even Outlook, given the right conditions, will gives you this in the default folders, Inbox in French is "Boite de réception".

Don't get me started on Outlook folders. The actual names are of the folders are localised, not just the way it's presented to the user. The folders are created when you first start Outlook (and not when your account is created). If you happen to be using Windows configured in a foreign language the first time you start Outlook, your inbox, sent mail, etc, folders are named according to that language, and will never…

That's why I take care that my OS doesn't know I'm French. But it's a luxury that most French people can't afford and they have to live with bugs. Ex: Having both a "Download" and a "Téléchargement" folder, with "Download" being sometimes translated.

Re: My last name makes me invisible to Computers (2015)

#110

Post by kgwgk »

mark-r wrote: post #79
dsp1234 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grave_accent "Programmers use the grave accent symbol as a separate character (i.e., not combined with any letter) for a number of tasks. In this role, it is known as a backquote or backtick."

ASCII never really supported the idea of a combining character, so it's not surprising that the original intent was subverted.

ASCII supported combining characters. That’s what backspace was for!

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11654682

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