31–40 of 199 posts
I recently found ULID. I like its simplicity. It is sequential. It has a very low probability of collision. And it is of a more reasonable length. Because it encodes the time, theoretically you could use it to grab the CreatedDate of a record without a need for another field. https://github.com/ulid/spec
When it comes to random identifiers, the advantage of uuid4 is mainly that it's a standard thing that everyone understands well, and finding a lib that generates one securely won't require any thought. It's never the ideal solution, but it's often good enough.
Agreed - not to mention the specification of new ones with different features keeps evolving.
A UUID can also be encoded in any form, it doesn't need to be represented as the dashed string notation which is common, you can just as easily use the base58 alphabet suggested in the post.
But the code in the post doesn't encode to base58 correctly. You need to map 58 bits of the input, sequentially, to one character in the alphabet as output. You can't just mod each byte of the input by the alphabet length and use the corresponding alphabet element.
The crux of this argument seems to be that UUIDs are too long? Which I disagree with. I can't memorize them, no, and it would be cumbersome to try to say one aloud, but these aren't situations I've ever found myself in. Does it make the URL in the URL bar longer? Yeah, but does that matter?
> Does it make the URL in the URL bar longer? Yeah, but does that matter? Yes. That's one of the author's arguments. ) A simple ID like 3c6n63N is more than enough to represent any product while keeping it readable and making communication easier. A UUID alternative like a73ba12d-1d8b-2516-3aee-4b15e563a835 is just wasteful from an user’s perspective.
And I bet that for most users 3c6n63N is as confusing as a73ba12d-1d8b-2516-3aee-4b15e563a835
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It matters aesthetically. A huge site like Amazon might care about that, otherwise it's not a high priority.
It somewhat matters aesthetically, but mostly people are going to ignore long random strings. UUIDs are at least visually kind of white noise, companies have no problem+with+links?that=look&like=this, so why do they care about UUIDs?
> A simple ID like 3c6n63N is more than enough to represent any product while keeping it readable and making communication easier. A UUID alternative like a73ba12d-1d8b-2516-3aee-4b15e563a835 is just wasteful from a user’s perspective. I would challenge the premise we appear to be starting from, that the average end user cares to be dealing with any random string of numbers and digits. GUIDs work well, they’re implem…
Small correction here but it is not 128 random bits entirely: 6 bits are reserved for the version marker.
For instance, UUIDs allow mobile apps to create entities while offline.