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I couldn't debug the code because of my name

mikolaj-kaminski.com

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

#181

Post by midev »

gumby wrote: post #174
midev wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's not. It's not even remotely victim blaming. At no point did anyone even remotely hint it was their fault. People have taken this to a ridiculous level. Giving practical advice about how to avoid problems is not blaming the victim. Telling my child to look both ways before crossing the street is not blaming him if he gets hit. It's not wanting to see him get hurt when the person actually at fault fucks up. Tel…

The computer is supposed to make our lives better, we should not be required to make the computer’s (or programmers’) life better. Your attitude reminds me of the people in the 60s who included punch cards in the utility bills, marking them “DO NOT FOLD, SPLINDLE, OR MUTILATE” (it became a meme). Or the people in Spain who changed their alphabet to make it easier for computers to sort. My name appears differently in…

> The computer is supposed to make our lives better, we should not be required to make the computer’s (or programmers’) life better

Yes... The computer is at fault for not supporting proper names... That's literally what everyone has said. Nobody blamed the user....

> Your attitude reminds me of the people in the 60s who included punch cards in the utility bills, marking them “DO NOT FOLD, SPLINDLE, OR MUTILATE” (it became a meme).

The problem should be fixed, but it's not victim blaming to tell someone how to still submit their bill.

> And you are saying that somehow I am at fault?

No... I'm literally saying the opposite.... I think you need to reread your comment, then my comment.

Telling you to omit those characters so you can still travel internationally is not blaming you in any way shape or form... Your criticism of practical advice being victim blaming is harmful and unhelpful.

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

#182

Post by Dannymetconan »

jltsiren wrote: post #130
Dannymetconan wrote: post #117

I can very much relate to this but also have very little sympathy here. I have a special character in my name, an apostrophe, and it causes trouble regularly online and with tooling. A number of years ago I decided just to never use it when it came to anything to do with technical work be it email, logins or usernames. Unicode characters are a pain to deal with and I have suffered from it first hand trying to handle…

My legal last name is "Sirén". When I was younger, I almost always used "Siren", because it was easier to type. Then, ~15 years ago, I started noticing that American websites sometimes rejected it, because they considered it inappropriate. Sometimes "Sirén" would work, sometimes it worked but caused minor annoyances, and sometimes it would not work for technical reasons. Both versions work most of the time these days…

Totally agree with the sentiment. It has gotten a lot better in the last 10 years. Very frustrating to have your name blacklisted by that. It does seem most system have a very US focused design.

I still find it funny that even in my home country you can't use a lot of local special characters in names. Also most airlines won't accept it so technically I'm not giving them my true name!

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

#183

Post by Dannymetconan »

ctdonath wrote: post #135
vultour wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm really surprised someone technically minded thought it's a good idea to put a non ASCII character in their username. I'd never do that.

I'm really surprised someone technically minded thought it's a good idea to not allow non ASCII alphanumerics in a username. Unicode has been a thing since 1988. Names have included non a-z characters since forever.

Well in this case they were explicitly allowed it just caused problems down the line when other system attempted to consume them.

String come up again and again as a hard issue to deal with especially once your start looking at Unicode. I think it would be very reasonable to assume only ASCII works and even then it doesn't always work!

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

#184

Post by ludamad »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #162
ludamad wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the record, it's a stark pronunciation difference as ł has drifted to a very different "w" sound

The fact most of the speakers of the language have switched to a different accent (by the way, I feel curious why) doesn't mean a fundamental difference. Same letters and whole same words are vocalized differently in the US and the UK (and even different regional accents within both countries) and nobody thinks about them as different letters/words. Ł still is the same letter, a direct counterpart to L in English, Ge…

I actually take a hint of offense that you say "Ł still is the same letter, a direct counterpart to L". By what measure? It was always a separate phoneme. Just because it shifted to w doesn't mean it wasn't distinct to poles to begin with - just now clearly distinct to everyone as the sound has only become more distinct! Pointing to ways we poles live with the situation doesn't mean it's ideal

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

#185

Post by qwerty456127 »

ludamad wrote: post #184
qwerty456127 wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact most of the speakers of the language have switched to a different accent (by the way, I feel curious why) doesn't mean a fundamental difference. Same letters and whole same words are vocalized differently in the US and the UK (and even different regional accents within both countries) and nobody thinks about them as different letters/words. Ł still is the same letter, a direct counterpart to L in English, Ge…

I actually take a hint of offense that you say "Ł still is the same letter, a direct counterpart to L". By what measure? It was always a separate phoneme. Just because it shifted to w doesn't mean it wasn't distinct to poles to begin with - just now clearly distinct to everyone as the sound has only become more distinct! Pointing to ways we poles live with the situation doesn't mean it's ideal

It was not "always a separate phoneme". English-L-like hard pronunciation of Ł still is valid Polish, although rare to encounter in real life outside certain regions in the east. In fact it is even considered sort of more literate (conservative/standard) in theory.

Would you also say Greek lambda has nothing to do with the English L? Or, slightly more relevant and complex example, actual Polish L with Slovak Ľ and Serbian Љ?

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

#186

Post by pezezin »

perl4ever wrote: post #155
xlii wrote: post #101

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 erro…

A Polish relative of mine used to just gave an arbitrary substitute name (e.g. "Dave Smith") for restaurant reservations, because even if they could write his last name, they wouldn't be able to pronounce it. My sibling has a name that has an accent, and just enters it with the plain letter most of the time. The name was once rare and "ethnic", but became popular a generation later so people know how to pronounce it…

I understand your troubles, I'm from Spain so I have two family names and my given name has an accent. Now that I'm living in Japan, it's an endless source of fun.

Regarding Chinese names and uncommon characters, Japan has the same problem. It's specially problematic for place names, with some kanji used to write the name of a single place in the whole country! I used to write in a place with such an obscure kanji that I wouldn't type it on my Linux PC.

It's also difficult for people moving to the other country, with some characters existing in one country but not in the other. I have a Chinese coworker who needs to write his name in katakana because his characters don't exist in Japanese.

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

#187

Post by ludamad »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #185
ludamad wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually take a hint of offense that you say "Ł still is the same letter, a direct counterpart to L". By what measure? It was always a separate phoneme. Just because it shifted to w doesn't mean it wasn't distinct to poles to begin with - just now clearly distinct to everyone as the sound has only become more distinct! Pointing to ways we poles live with the situation doesn't mean it's ideal

It was not "always a separate phoneme". English-L-like hard pronunciation of Ł still is valid Polish, although rare to encounter in real life outside certain regions in the east. In fact it is even considered sort of more literate (conservative/standard) in theory. Would you also say Greek lambda has nothing to do with the English L? Or, slightly more relevant and complex example, actual Polish L with Slovak Ľ and Se…

Can you provide argument that a letter was created for Polish for something that was not a phoneme? It has always co-existed with normal L, while it has sometimes sounded close to L I don't think one could say standard Polish ever merged these.

Conservative Ł would still be distinct.

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

#188

Post by ordu »

ufo wrote: post #151
ssivark wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s about as aggravating as asking Ryan to change name to Pyan — because the encoding doesn’t support “R” and “P” looks very similar.

Interestingly, this particular change would work in cyrillic :)

Руап?

No, "Яуап" is better, I think.

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

#189

Post by askvictor »

Somewhat surprising that this is an issue with JetBrains, given that they are based in Eastern Europe, and would probably have more direct experience of these sorts of problems than US or UK based companies. OTOH maybe it's just a scale thing - bigger companies have more resources to handle these sort of cases, regardless where they're based (not that they always do...)

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

#190

Post by qwerty456127 »

ludamad wrote: post #187
qwerty456127 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was not "always a separate phoneme". English-L-like hard pronunciation of Ł still is valid Polish, although rare to encounter in real life outside certain regions in the east. In fact it is even considered sort of more literate (conservative/standard) in theory. Would you also say Greek lambda has nothing to do with the English L? Or, slightly more relevant and complex example, actual Polish L with Slovak Ľ and Se…

Can you provide argument that a letter was created for Polish for something that was not a phoneme? It has always co-existed with normal L, while it has sometimes sounded close to L I don't think one could say standard Polish ever merged these. Conservative Ł would still be distinct.

You probably misunderstood me, I never meant to say Polish Ł and Polish L are the same and have no reason to be distinguished. I meant Polish Ł is a direct counterpart to English L and only differs significantly by the sake of regional/historical shift in accents.

The problem is some software just has problems with non-English alphabets because, roughly saying, all the software was meant to only process English text historically and much of it still has not been fixed. Users of non-latin-based alphabets have been accustomed to this and have no problem writing "Иван" as "Ivan" (despite it normally reads even more different in English, more correct phonetic transliteration would be "Eevan"). Heck they even spell "Семён" (~"Semyon", the Russian counterpart to English "Simon") as "Semen" X-). But the users of diacriticized Latin somehow get surprised with this.

If I could travel back in time to when ASCII was designed and give the engineers a hint I would ask them to add first-class diacritics to their design so anybody would be able to add the slash for Ł, the umlaut for Ü, Ö or whatever using an extra byte. Sadly, even today we mostly encode Ü as a letter absolutely distinct to U rather than a combination of the latter with the umlaut even though Unicode allows doing this the latter way AFAIK.

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