Isn't it strange that bits of essential knowledge ends up being either opaque (some form of code that does some magic) or negative, as in these 'falsehoods'?
A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
41–50 of 128 posts
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#42I am always appalled when systems (built in the US) have difficulties with apostrophes in the names. I mean, have you missed all the Irish names that exist in the US? It would be "fair enough" forgetting about accents when computing resources were limited, but to not deal with apostrophes? Really? (I mean, ok, this story is not new, just look at the history of the https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fu63…
Apostrophes in street names is a bit of a cause célèbre in the UK. Also, should we treat ' and ’ as equivalent?
Can't forget about ` and ’
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#43Actually most of these things are not bound to programmers. In fact, I think programmers in general are more aware of these lists.
Yes, but in the other hand, if you don't handle validation or storage of these things it's rather irrelevant.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, the issue is quite simply: why does your system care what gender the person has? Unless it has a specific need for it, don't even bother You might ask if it should use Mr./Ms. (or Dr. or some other academic title) etc but even that is a bit anachronistic. Maybe this makes sense if you're sending mail to your customer, but even then. How to solve 50% of your GDPR troubles: stop asking for data you have absolutely…
I can't think of a situation where it's appropriate to ask for a title, other than for government ID. 99.9999% of the time a field for "How can we address you" with a freeform input is perfect. It lets me put in " " or "Dr. 张伟" and be done with it.
In Austria some people are VERY insistent that you use the proper title. Along with that, we need to report certain titles to the government too, because of calculating wages.
And, for us, it is easier to treat all titles the same on the backend side, rather than allow freeform input.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't think of a situation where it's appropriate to ask for a title, other than for government ID. 99.9999% of the time a field for "How can we address you" with a freeform input is perfect. It lets me put in " " or "Dr. 张伟" and be done with it.
In Austria some people are VERY insistent that you use the proper title. Along with that, we need to report certain titles to the government too, because of calculating wages. And, for us, it is easier to treat all titles the same on the backend side, rather than allow freeform input.
There are cultures in which the honorific is required. There are cultures in which it is not only not required but despised. I have encountered too many web forms in which a gendered honorific is required input, and you must select from a drop-down list.
The people who design those forms are second in line to be put against the wall when the revolution comes. Right behind the people who design free-form input for international telephone numbers but have a hidden undocumented mandatory format that gets rejected and all you see is a red asterisk beside the field when you "Submit" is rejected and all the other fields get blanked out.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#46There are things more important than working software.
Yes it's better to do something, anything, than to do something useful or correct.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
>For example, in official Russian documents it's Surname-Name-Patronimic. Which will of course break for immigrants, asylum seekers, foreigners etc How does it break? Wouldn't government just form patronimic from fathers name and call it a day?
That's how it's usually solved, and it's a very awkward workaround: - there are cases when the father isn't known. Or even the surname isn't known (people dealing with asylum seekers run into these issues all the time) - Foreign names are not easily converted to patronymics. Russian has adapted Russian names to this scheme: Ivan —> Ivánovich, Vasily -> Vasilevich, Ilya -> Ilyich (note the suffixes -[ov]ich, -[ev]ich,…
>Once you get foreign names, this becomes weird even with European names, and they are often related to a degree to Russian names. Asian names become weird to the extreme, especially with names like Hui which are a cuss word in Russian [1] John -> Johnovich may work, but Huich will not :)
In this case registry official simply starts writing random shit into the system and it becomes your problem. At least that's how it was with "not so Russian names" in USSR times -- just write whatever Russian name that starts with same letter.
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#48This doesn't seem curated. It just seems like a list (a long one bloated one at that).
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Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#49After reading the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, I wonder, what would you recommend as a universal way to store users's names? There seems to be two main options: Store the name in a single field, be correct but lose the option to sort the names reliably. Store the name in two fields, have the users bend over our western form standards but be able to search and sort easily. Do you have any real life expe…
>Store the name in two fields, have the users bend over our western form standards but be able to search and sort easily. You can't search and sort easily if the names are stored in Japanese. You need 4 fields for that. Edit: now that I think about it I could think of a disgustingly hacky way to squash them into 2 fields and retain those properties, and by extension into a single field and retain those properties.
Why would you need 4 fields?
Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe
#50I am always appalled when systems (built in the US) have difficulties with apostrophes in the names. I mean, have you missed all the Irish names that exist in the US? It would be "fair enough" forgetting about accents when computing resources were limited, but to not deal with apostrophes? Really? (I mean, ok, this story is not new, just look at the history of the https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fu63…
It would be easier to just make all computing systems use Internet English, if a word ends in "s" and doesn't have an apostrophe before it then add one.