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A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

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Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#51

Post by _448 »

a_shovel wrote: post #19

I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult. You can get 95% with no effort at all, 99% with a bit of thought, 99.9% with some effort, 99.99% with a smart design, some research, and a lot of effort, and anything further requires making it your full-time job indefinitely. It gets thornier when it comes to personal things l…

> It gets thornier when it comes to personal things like names and gender.

In the case of name, I read an article sometime back that mentioned the problem of getting people's fullname right. Not everyone has a "first name" and a "last name" distinction. So it is better to just have one field of "fullname" and let people enter it as per their locale and tradition instead of having "first name" and "last name" fields. I think gender also falls in the same category.

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#53

Post by stormbrew »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #27
a_shovel wrote: post #19

I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult. You can get 95% with no effort at all, 99% with a bit of thought, 99.9% with some effort, 99.99% with a smart design, some research, and a lot of effort, and anything further requires making it your full-time job indefinitely. It gets thornier when it comes to personal things l…

In regards to your last line, I feel like we do need to give people some leeway and not assume bigoted intent. Most of the things we can gig people for not implementing nowadays are only recently important in our cultural consciousness. English has traditionally shied away from using accents and one can reasonably assume that if a person signs up for my English language website, they won't be using Chinese characters…

> I also think using they/them is only recently considered grammatically acceptable.

In general, as a singular gender neutral third person pronoun for a person of unknown, unclear, or unspecified gender, they/them is approximately as old as modern english itself, having been clearly used by one of the earliest practitioners of the language, Shakespeare.

What's modern is the idea that it's somehow incorrect to have a pronoun that is both plural and singular, which is funny because 'you' is both singular and plural and people use it every day without incident or confusion.

Use for a person of known but not-binary gender is newer than that, but probably older than you think, and neopronouns are actually probably also quite a bit older than you think too.

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#54

Post by feoren »

_448 wrote: post #51
a_shovel wrote: post #19

I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult. You can get 95% with no effort at all, 99% with a bit of thought, 99.9% with some effort, 99.99% with a smart design, some research, and a lot of effort, and anything further requires making it your full-time job indefinitely. It gets thornier when it comes to personal things l…

> It gets thornier when it comes to personal things like names and gender. In the case of name, I read an article sometime back that mentioned the problem of getting people's fullname right. Not everyone has a "first name" and a "last name" distinction. So it is better to just have one field of "fullname" and let people enter it as per their locale and tradition instead of having "first name" and "last name" fields.…

This is the first "falsehoods programmers believe about X" article I read and what I think kicked off the trend. In fact this GitHub page references the same as "the article that started it all".

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#55

Post by layer8 »

matsemann wrote: post #2

> A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe in. No, these "awesome" lists are seldom curated . They are just dumps of hundreds or thousands of links.

I guess they really meant "slightly categorized because otherwise the list would be too long".

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#56

Post by feoren »

quadrifoliate wrote: post #50
a_shovel wrote: post #19

I think the lesson to take from these lists is that covering every edge case for many real-world situations becomes asymptotically difficult. You can get 95% with no effort at all, 99% with a bit of thought, 99.9% with some effort, 99.99% with a smart design, some research, and a lot of effort, and anything further requires making it your full-time job indefinitely. It gets thornier when it comes to personal things l…

> That said, it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases...if you implement gender as a boolean that also determines the user's pronouns. It is probably revealing of your personal biases that you cannot imagine systems in languages other than English that need to do some of this since multiple parts of the language, including verbs, are necessarily gendered, with a neutral gender usually only reserved for inan…

There's a world of difference between "Which of these two options defines your gender identity and sex organs?" and "Which grammatical gender form should we use for words when we talk about you?". The former is a deeply personal question with unclear benefit; the latter is a specific question about how you want the site to do a specific thing it needs to do. (Does it really need to do that? Why exactly are you asking about gender?)

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#57

Post by bko »

stormbrew wrote: post #48
implements wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you sure most systems even need to record gender or pronouns? Outside of medicine sex is rarely significant, and if by gender you mean masculine or feminine traits then again (other to the person themselves) it’s largely irrelevant I’d have thought.

Pronouns can be useful in any system that generates text that refers to people in the third person, so makes sense to ask -- but it also makes sense to just let people put in whatever they want unless you are trying to aggregate data from it for marketing purposes, in which case imo you should stop doing that. > Outside of medicine sex is rarely significant Frankly, even inside of medicine it's usually not terribly r…

> Frankly, even inside of medicine it's usually not terribly relevant, and is often a poor proxy for the information they really want out of it.

Sex is incredibly important inside medicine. It's probably the most important distinguishing characteristic when determining how to diagnose and treat someone (maybe weight is more).

Here are a few examples:

- 99% of breast cancer occurs in women

- any diseases affecting the female[male] reproductive systems can only impact women[men]

- 4x as many women suffer from osteoporosis

- Roughly 70% of those living with autoimmune diseases are female

- stomach cancer (2:1 men) oesophageal cancer (3:1 men) liver cancer (2:1 to 4:1 men)

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

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#58

Post by [deleted] »

miloignis wrote: post #22
qwerty456127 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because I really don't want to accept a string with more (or less) than one @ symbol for an e-mail address. Such an address can be valid theoretically but chances are it is incorrect. If somebody submits such a string for their email, 99 in 100 cases it's a typo and the remaining 1 is a person testing you. Not even one real person in a million will use an e-mail address which doesn't have exactly one @ symbol in it.

People can also incorrectly type in their email in a way that looks fine, so I'm skeptical of intentionally not allowing valid email addresses just to cut out a small fraction of those. The isemail.info site recommends a warning if it doesn't look right, but allowing the user to override and use anyway, which seems sensible to me. (I say this as the proud owner of a lastname.email domain, where the .email TLD was mad…

[deleted]

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#59

Post by teakettle42 »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #15
NateEag wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All that said, there are a number of really good email validators out there in the wild. One of the oldest can be found at http://isemail.info/about , (along with a test suite to write your own implementation and some sage advice about the basic approaches it's reasonable to take when validating email addresses). Yes, dependencies aren't completely free conceptually, even when they're distributed free of charge, but…

Because I really don't want to accept a string with more (or less) than one @ symbol for an e-mail address. Such an address can be valid theoretically but chances are it is incorrect. If somebody submits such a string for their email, 99 in 100 cases it's a typo and the remaining 1 is a person testing you. Not even one real person in a million will use an e-mail address which doesn't have exactly one @ symbol in it.

You can ask for confirmation if it’s an unusual construction, but denying it outright is user hostile.

Also, how many users are actually manually typing their e-mail address into a form, instead of using autofill?

As the referenced page says, a valid email address is one that can receive email. If you really care about the e-mail address being correct, then you need to validate it by sending a verification e-mail.

Re: A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

#60

Post by stormbrew »

bko wrote: post #57
stormbrew wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pronouns can be useful in any system that generates text that refers to people in the third person, so makes sense to ask -- but it also makes sense to just let people put in whatever they want unless you are trying to aggregate data from it for marketing purposes, in which case imo you should stop doing that. > Outside of medicine sex is rarely significant Frankly, even inside of medicine it's usually not terribly r…

> Frankly, even inside of medicine it's usually not terribly relevant, and is often a poor proxy for the information they really want out of it. Sex is incredibly important inside medicine. It's probably the most important distinguishing characteristic when determining how to diagnose and treat someone (maybe weight is more). Here are a few examples: - 99% of breast cancer occurs in women - any diseases affecting the…

Yep, called the kneejerk.

These are statistical differences. If you want to know if they apply to an individual you need to know more. A checkbox on a form is not sufficient.

If you're usefully aggregating data for some purpose, say for a study, then go off ask all the relevant indicators you want.

If it's an intake form for an eye doctor appointment, it won't tell you dick all. If a patient came in for a breast exam, you already know they're at risk of cancer. If you're their family doctor figuring out risk factors, you already know their medical history.

And if they're trans or intersex, and you're assuming that either their assigned sex or their self-declared gender tells you which bucket they fall in, you know a lot more than anyone else about how those traits affect those things because they are woefully understudied, and almost certainly complicated by literally everything in their medical history.

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