Earlier quoted context omitted.
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Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)
81–90 of 115 posts
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)
#82More than anything, this reflects how many business decisions a "programmer" makes.
If a "programmer" was actually just a programmer, none of their beliefs would matter. Either it met the spec, or not.
But in reality, a lot of the job of a "programmer" is to make all those detailed decisions, and handle all the exceptional cases, that other people don't want to be bothered to think about. But those detailed decisions and edge cases need to be handled because much of the value of software is running the business worldwide at all hours with fewer humans involved, so those edge cases will come up constantly.
So all these little decisions fall on the one writing software. That's actually an incredible amount of power once you realize it.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)
#83> This particular example name [Tanaka Tarou 田中太郎] is perhaps best known as the name of an alien in an anime series (and a manga). There have also been real people with this name. Huh? That's a bit like saying the name "John Doe" is "perhaps best known from being the name of a character in a movie." It's just the stand-in, "generic" Japanese name that's used in examples. If an alien had the name in a cartoon it was p…
> What do you want me to do about it? When you write code that accepts names, don’t bake in assumptions that violate these falsehoods.
OK, so what I'm asking you is how I am meant to handle names which are characters that are literally impossible to represent with a computer.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only way I can think of do that would be to not make a name field mandatory. That's certainly possible in some applications, but not in others. For example, I work in insurance and we need a name to put on the policy documents.
If your company can’t insure someone whose name violates these assumptions, then the best you can do is make those assumptions clear.
If you book travel, they have something you're supposed to put in the last name field if you don't have one.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What do you think would be a better way of going about it? I suppose it depends on what you're trying to accomplish. This article definitely reads like it's trying to annoy developers to the point of closing the page though, even if it's intentions are relatively agreeable. I'm reminded of the whole 'master vs main' debacle, where this kind of tribalism hit critical mass. There was huge potential for people to have…
Most of these issues can be solved by simply providing a "Name" field that accepts Unicode and has a reasonable length. Don't validate it in any way except to require at least one non-whitespace character. Trim any excess whitespace and run the text through a Unicode normalization algorithm. At most, filter out Unicode blocks that can't possibly apply, such as emoji and maths symbols. Done. That covers something like…
I consider breaking the fields up well worth the trade-off of people without a surname having some difficulty with it, because that situation is extremely rare, and the user experience is significantly worse if, e.g., I can't meaningfully sort names because I have no idea if you put your given name first or last, etc.
There's also really nothing about JSON that should dictate that you can't handle the name "Null" or "O'Neill." You don't even need special escaping for those.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or do, and just don't care that Elon Musk's kid won't be able to use your application
You're being obtuse. Everybody can still use the application. The just need to supply a name that is valid to the application. THIS IS REASONABLE
And considering the great number of official forms one must fill out which make the same assumptions that programmers foolishly believe, I am inclined to believe that The Artist Formerly Known as Prince or whoever already has some idea what they'll put in the fields to accommodate their unusual situation.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)
#87"with examples" => Follows up by not giving examples to a bunch of entries "Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly accepted standard for names. And will your software only be dealing with people named by your society?" "I can safely assume that this dictionary of bad words contains no people’s names in it. This is a common mistake – many “bad words” are not bad words…
I can do the bad words one: in Thai, the root word “porn” (pronounced like the English word “pawn”) can be loosely translated as “blessing” and forms the basis of many given names, surnames and place names. Any blacklist that includes the word “porn” will cut out a lot of totally normal Thai names like Siriporn or Pornrapat.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
They refused to accept a romanization? If so that's doubly bad. Excusing technical deficiencies is one thing, but preventing people from working around them is indicative of a high level organizational failure.
Yes, it had to be identical. The problem with romanization of Cyrillic is that there's no commonly accepted standard, and I suspect the employees who process the applications were very unlikely to be Russian, so they would have no idea how to match our romanized variant to what's found on the ID scans. At least if they allowed Cyrillic in the submit form, they could have compared it visually as a set of pictograms, n…
Countries which are getting rarer and rarer. I'm in China and we havent yet faced such problems at the office (we too are mandated to get those certs).
But in China, there are 5 Microsoft-approved offline training centers per metro station in any city with IT employees + the flats are so small you cant possible be uninterrupted during the exam during covid, so we mostly go offline.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)
#89More than anything, this reflects how many business decisions a "programmer" makes. If a "programmer" was actually just a programmer, none of their beliefs would matter. Either it met the spec, or not. But in reality, a lot of the job of a "programmer" is to make all those detailed decisions, and handle all the exceptional cases, that other people don't want to be bothered to think about. But those detailed decisions…
Because the speed at which they can write good specs cannot match a competitor doing iterative back and forth from an elevator discussion. Even in large slow banks, we churn feature releases weekly now with half finished stuff behind feature flags to see if they like it so far. And well, it works and they re happier and we can have lighter BAs, and spec mistakes cost a lot less as they are spotted faster, not after 3 months of blind work.
Oh and btw the value of software is not to handle every edge cases well, but to be able to change, imho.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)
#90A more realistic example for 40 ("people have names"): Newborns might not have a name. Lots of systems might have to handle newborns.
Realistic name from working in the NT: Someone with your name died, so you no longer have a name until the elders convene to give you one. This may take somewhere between hours and years.
However, after a period of time dictated by the hierarchial position of the one who died, you will be given the choice to retake your previous name, or maintain your new one, if you have it.
Several name changes with the differing clocks for switching may overlap. Each time, you may end up with interspersed periods of no name.
Every time a change occurs, you are not normally allowed to acknowledge that the previous name was ever attached to you. As such, your gov IDs have a numeric constant, like everyone else, but no name fields.
On an island of a thousand, I estimated roughly 10% of people at any one time had no name.