Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

I couldn't debug the code because of my name

mikolaj-kaminski.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 300 posts

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#101

Post by xlii »

Very similar problem to one described started my exodus from Google services.

I also have non-latin characters in my name however I knew it was always an issue so I never used it in paths etc.

At some point, long time ago, I was tasked to do some maintance with Google Cloud service (can't remember the name of the service now) which was doable only through Python CLI utility and it failed with very similar Python error.

What I found out rather quickly is that utility took my name from Google+ profile, which did include those non-latin characters. No biggie - I thought and fired e-mail to support (yeah it was those times it was still that easy). Few hours passed and I received information that this won't be fixed anytime soon and the best course of action would be to change my name.

Of course, support person probably meant to remove the diacriticals from my Google+ profiles, but still it left unplesant aftertaste for years to come.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#102

Post by gerdesj »

mkotowski wrote: post #93

I, too, have the Ł letter in my name, and yes, it is a sick joke that so many things even in a supposedly modern systems make an assumption that the world runs on ASCII. In the case of the Windows operating system, the worst fact is that every single part of it behaves differently. Some parts display the path with a wrong encoding, but handle it correctly. A third-party app can display it correctly, but fails while t…

Can Ł have an alternative representation? For example the German ß => ss. Also I think ö can be written as oe.

In English we simply shake the big bag of letters, pick a few at random and then throw them at the page until a few stick.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#103

Post by pavel_lishin »

mbesto wrote: post #72
ainar-g wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially if those products are developed by a company from Russia, where Cyrillic is used. For me, a Russian myself, this situation is honestly ridiculous.

Do you write "if" statements in Cyrillic when you write in ?

It would be very amusing to see "если" in an if statement, given how much it looks and sound like "else" at a brief glance.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#104

Post by xxpor »

thereddaikon wrote: post #90
q3k wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems that you're implying computers are universally american and therefore people are expected to speak/use/adapt to american.

That's the harsh way to put it. A more diplomatic way is that computing is not unique in having deeply ingrained artifacts of the language and culture that birthed it and developed many of the paradigms. Take anything having to do with seamanship. There are many terms that date back to early modern English that simply don't make sense anymore yet are accepted and universal because the British Empire had a large and e…

There's also the practical consideration that English, due to having a) an alphabet b) letter shapes that aren't affected by surrounding letters and c) no diacritics, is the easiest major language to store and display on a computer. Even if silicon valley ended up in a country with a logographic writing system, I'd bet that the first character set that would have been used would have been Latin based

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#105

Post by munk-a »

aidenn0 wrote: post #94
munk-a wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also important to width-test fields. Never forget to make sure that WWWWWWWWWWWW doesn't cause weird application wrapping.

I used a system where the maximum length on the "new password" field in the change password form was longer than the password field in the login form. The symptom was that I could login if I used my password manager browser plugin, but not if I pasted it from my password manager.

I maintained a system where we had unbounded password length... but only respected the first six characters of the password. (we did fix that).

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#106

Post by kmlx »

no_time wrote: post #27
xwdv wrote: post #6

What’s wrong with just writing it as Mikolaj? It’s not like it’s a kanji or something.

Because it's not his name. Imagine you are John but you had to make do with Yohn because the people designing you software didn't need the letter J...

it was 30 years ago when i discovered that it doesn’t really matter what my name is. the system i’m interacting with expects my name to be “john” or something like that. so i let it be.

30 years later and i completely dropped all non-latin chars from my name in any and all forms. from airplane tickets to passport to you name it.

and you know what? no one cared about non-latin. not even the government. i loled when i actually realised.

i’ve encountered zero issues ever since.

and it’s been the same for lots of my friends. they just adopted some western name. case closed, no more issues.

it all depends on who much importance you attribute to your name. for me it’s always been a random variable. for others it’s a matter of pride. but to the “system” it will be a “random list of chars”, sometimes latin, other times utf.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#107

Post by greenshackle2 »

garaetjjte wrote: post #61
MadeThisToReply wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep. For example, the name of the third-largest city in Poland is "Łódź", which might look like it's pronounced "lods", but is actually pronounced more like "wootch".

Sometimes you end up with parcel addressed to city "??d?". Shipping systems cannot cope with non-ASCII chars more often than I would expect...

I've seen shipping labels with HTML encoded characters, like é and è. I'm not sure if that's better or worse:

Łódź

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#108

Post by AdrianB1 »

no_time wrote: post #27
xwdv wrote: post #6

What’s wrong with just writing it as Mikolaj? It’s not like it’s a kanji or something.

Because it's not his name. Imagine you are John but you had to make do with Yohn because the people designing you software didn't need the letter J...

My name contains non-Latin characters (apparently strange as we use a Latin language), but 40 years of working with computers I learned to avoid using the original form and always convert to ASCII; yes, it is not my name, but my pride and sense of entitlement are not hurt at all.

Sometimes it is better to avoid being hit by the bus even if you are right.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#109

Post by rodgerd »

sschueller wrote: post #31

Many years ago I could not access the apple developer panel because of the umlaut in my last name. It was eventually fixed but I was quite surprised that such a large company would run into such a basic issue.

If you look at many of the responses here it's sadly unsurprising: small-minded provincialism or outright xenophobia are no less common amongst programmers than the general population.

Re: I couldn't debug the code because of my name

#110

Post by q3k »

gerdesj wrote: post #102
mkotowski wrote: post #93

I, too, have the Ł letter in my name, and yes, it is a sick joke that so many things even in a supposedly modern systems make an assumption that the world runs on ASCII. In the case of the Windows operating system, the worst fact is that every single part of it behaves differently. Some parts display the path with a wrong encoding, but handle it correctly. A third-party app can display it correctly, but fails while t…

Can Ł have an alternative representation? For example the German ß => ss. Also I think ö can be written as oe. In English we simply shake the big bag of letters, pick a few at random and then throw them at the page until a few stick.

> Can Ł have an alternative representation?

Nope. Neither can ź, ć, ś, ą or ę. You can, and people do write them as z, c, s, a and e when writing in a restriced character set, but that is not 'correct' and is not a bijection, ie. „półka” and „polka” mean two different things.

There's also the case of technically-same-sounding-especially-recently ż/rz and ó/u (whose replacement would let you get rid of two 'non standard' characters), but for historical reasons these are not interchangeable.

Post reply on HN