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Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)

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Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)

#101

Post by tkgally »

emodendroket wrote: post #36

> 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…

One real person with that name is the current editor of a Japanese science magazine [1] that has been published since 1931. I did some work for him about ten years ago. He is a very nice man.

[1] https://www.iwanami.co.jp/ad/kagaku/

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)

#102

Post by okanat »

Zababa wrote: post #4

> In some countries (notably French speaking) it is convention to write a person’s surname in all caps to make it clear which part of the name is the surname. This is a French-specific thing? I didn't know that. I really like it, it makes it easier to know which part is the name and which part is the family name.

There are a bunch of countries that were ruled by France or adapted it by cultural exchange. We also capitalize the surnames in Turkey. Not as often anymore but it is a thing for many official documents.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)

#103

Post by goto11 »

emodendroket wrote: post #36

> 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…

> OK, maybe someone's name is one character that's not possible to represent with Unicode. What do you want me to do about it?

The example with The Artist Formerly Known as Prince is rather contrived. More realistic is the Chinese family names which are not yet supported by Unicode.

But if you can get away with it, it is perfectly reasonable business decision to only support names which can be represented as Unicode characters! The point of the article is just that you should be aware about the assumptions you make, and the less assumptions you need to make, the fewer problems.

A less contrived example would be the forms which required a last name of at least two characters. This is just dumb, since "O" is a perfectly valid and even reasonably common last name. So the writers put in extra effort to outlaw certain names, for no benefit whatsoever. Presumably they thought all real names are at least two characters long. Knowing this was a faulty assumption would have saved them the time they spent on making their site less useful.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)

#104

Post by lotsofpulp »

wbl wrote: post #91
emodendroket wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There are entire counties with single names.

Which ones?

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)

#105

Post by lotsofpulp »

isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote: post #23
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #15

In some countries, women have different last names than men do. Eg. in macedonia, traditionally a person would get their fathers name as their surname (so if the fathers name was "Petar", and the son was Dragan, the lastname would be roughly translated to "Dragan of Peter"). Because there are different forms for feminine and masculine words, The son would be named "Dragan Petrovski", and the daughter (Eg Marija) woul…

In old Polish there was also a special form of name for unmarried women, so for example: Jan Kowalski has a daughter, Anna Kowalska. When she is young, she is called Anna Kowalszczonka, Kowaliczka or Kowalówna depending on who you asked (and you can't reliably reverse these forms into the original name) When she is grown up, she is called Anna Kowalska. As it happens, the country was part of the Russian empire, so sh…

This feels like the opposite of KISS principle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KISS_principle

I would recommend my daughter or son to keep their name even after marriage just to avoid paperwork hastle.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)

#106

Post by eesmith »

elchief wrote: post #3

A personal name is either a Polynym (a name with multiple sortable components), a Mononym (a name with only one component), or a Pictonym (a name represented by a picture - this exists due to people like [Prince][1]). A person can have multiple names, playing roles, such as LEGAL, MARITAL, MAIDEN, PREFERRED, SOBRIQUET, PSEUDONYM, etc. You might have business rules, such as "a person can only have one legal name at a…

Your Malcom X is interesting because I think he would have used the term "SLAVE-NAME" for the role instead of "BIRTH". This leads to the question of who gets to decide the category names - a topic which I am wholly unqualified to discuss!

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)

#108

Post by kwhitefoot »

tharkun__ wrote: post #62
ajsnigrutin wrote: post #15

In some countries, women have different last names than men do. Eg. in macedonia, traditionally a person would get their fathers name as their surname (so if the fathers name was "Petar", and the son was Dragan, the lastname would be roughly translated to "Dragan of Peter"). Because there are different forms for feminine and masculine words, The son would be named "Dragan Petrovski", and the daughter (Eg Marija) woul…

This is the case in many countries. Nordic countries do this too (...-son and ...-dottir etc.) And FWIW, in Quebec, women are not allowed to take their husband's last name when they marry. They choose for the kids.

> Nordic countries do this too (...-son and ...-dottir etc.)

Not for a long time. Only Iceland does that now.

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)

#109

Post by Beldin »

Funnily enough, the example about the importance of capitalisation has a capitalisation error.

It's "Van Gogh" when written without the first name. With, it becomes "Vincent van Gogh".

Basically, the "filler words" are without capital unless "naked" at the start of the noun.

So it also is "Van der Staaij" or "Kees van der Staaij".

Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about names – with examples (2018)

#110

Post by mcphage »

dahfizz wrote: post #78
mcphage wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

How do you even accept names if the name is not representable in any character encoding?

Probably you can't, because the person couldn't even type their name in. So if you're writing an application, that's one that's outside your control, and you can't do anything about.
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