61–70 of 128 posts
- The compiler won’t have bugs.
- The compiler won’t have show-stopping bugs.
- The compiler’s bugs will be fixed quickly.
- The compiler’s bugs can be fixed.
But I think they should have added:
- My code does not work because of bugs in the compiler..
I would love an annotated falsehoods. For instance, one of the falsehoods programmers believe about programming: Most processors in active use are 32-bit or larger. 16-bit or larger? 8-bit or larger? OH COME ON!
The original one about names was about exposing people to different culture's perspective (like how Icelanders have last names based on their father's first name), but this expands into nonsensical territory like "people can change genders multiple times a day"[1]. It just feels like being a rebel for rebellion's sake. [1]: https://medium.com/gender-2-0/falsehoods-programmers-believe...
"Eddie Izzard, why do you wear women's clothes?"
Eddie Izzard: "I don't. These are my clothes. I bought them."
"Falsehoods programmers believe about geography: Street adresses contain street names. In many remote places in Europe, the hamlet name is considered a sufficient address." Yup, I used to spend my summers on an island where my address would be: farmstead name, island, country. Zip code was optional. Had to find creative ways to satisfy various web forms.
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…
People make mistakes. I think you're opening a can of worms if you try to conflate a lack of robustness in user experience accessibility with some underlying anti-inclusivity bias.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases... I think that is an unfair accusation. I've been coding for over 20 years, and I have only had to enable UTF8 to cover all corners of use cases (web based data/content) to special characters. I work with companies in multiple foreign countries, and my biases are irrelevant to technically working systems.
Sounds like you have never tried sorting or searching. Where in the alphabet does "ö" or "aa" go? Well, it depends on the language AND the word. Is ø the same as ø? Unicode can encode it in 2 different ways, so you need to normalize all encoding before comparing. Is ø the same as o when searching? For Americans it is, for others not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> ...it is incredibly revealing of your personal biases... I think that is an unfair accusation. I've been coding for over 20 years, and I have only had to enable UTF8 to cover all corners of use cases (web based data/content) to special characters. I work with companies in multiple foreign countries, and my biases are irrelevant to technically working systems.
The bias in this is whatever belief system one might have to say "ASCII is good enough". Or whatever level of ignorance to believe that ASCII is good enough without understanding that it cannot be. Etc.
This is where the accusation crosses into unreasonable for me.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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…
To make things short and somewhat anonymous, we had several systems that couldn’t handle people changing the “gender” of their social security number. They could handle you getting a new social security number, but it had to be of the same “gender” as your previous.
This makes no real sense, as it’s just a number and all these systems handle both types of numbers. But there we were, and it took us several years to get to a point where we could accommodate an employee changing the “gender” of their social security number.
So sometimes, developers do weird things because of their assumptions.
Ps. I’ve put “gender” in “”s because I’m unsure what the right word is in English.