51–60 of 128 posts
Unfortunately - especially when dealing with non-technical ideas - some of these "falsehoods" veer into opinion territory. It's an interesting resource but perhaps the title of it is a little egoistic/presumptuous in that regard.
Clickbait with a lot of effort but poor delivery of title and expectations
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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?
I 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…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Let's just rename everyone a GUID and be done with it.
And pronounce it in NATO alphabet.
Four Five Nine Alpha Six Five Bravo Foxtrot -Bravo Alpha Alpha Eight -Four Delta Five Eight -Nine Nine Five Five -Two Six Delta Echo Seven Five Charlie Five Four Zero Five Seven
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 int…
We have 3 gender options, mandated by law, in a dropdown which makes sense for our company. But we don't mandate honoriffics, nor do we use a gendered form where possible. And all input goes through an employee. (We are a worker leasing company, ONLY active in Austria)
> 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.
You need a revolution to justify it?
Unfortunately - especially when dealing with non-technical ideas - some of these "falsehoods" veer into opinion territory. It's an interesting resource but perhaps the title of it is a little egoistic/presumptuous in that regard.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why would you need 4 fields?
To store the furigana for the given name and family name to allow you to correctly perform sort operations.
How could you store that in a separate field from the name? Don't the characters in the furigana need to be matched up in a certain way with the characters in the name?
It seems like storing the characters in line in the same field as the name would actually be the more correct thing to do here, using a system like Unicode's interlinear annotation characters for ruby text.
I 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…
They probably use some terrible SQL backend and filter them out to prevent problems. Yes, that's a 2005 problem, but things take a long time to go away.
Sabre is from the 60s and doesn't like apostrophes in names https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabre_(computer_system)
There are things more important than working software.
A fair few of the these lists (which are fascinating, by the way - just pick one at random) are ultimately about respecting people and culture. Being bothered to correctly handle calendars or naming conventions (and lots of other things) that may be unfamiliar is helping to include people who might otherwise be excluded, or treated as second class.
You can use libraries to paper over this trade off but then you have other trade offs like needing to worry about bugs you have no control over.
In the end, if you don’t feel at least a little bad about the software you’ve written or how long it took to write it, you are probably doing something wrong