A curated list of falsehoods programmers believe

Very true, we all know there are 92 genders

After reading the Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names, I wonder, what would you recommend as a universal way to store users's names?

There seems to be two main options:

Store the name in a single field, be correct but lose the option to sort the names reliably.

Store the name in two fields, have the users bend over our western form standards but be able to search and sort easily.

Do you have any real life experience with these or other "falsehoods"?

A fair few of the these lists (which are fascinating, by the way - just pick one at random) are ultimately about respecting people and culture. Being bothered to correctly handle calendars or naming conventions (and lots of other things) that may be unfamiliar is helping to include people who might otherwise be excluded, or treated as second class.

I think instead of trying to break names apart from one input, the best strategy is to consider the various uses you need and provide that many inputs (in a previous job writing software for art galleries, this was our solution).

So for example, you might have a "display name" field, which is the formal name-of-record that you need for any official or semi-official context (title card of an artwork, or invoice info, going on the art example).

For indexing/sorting, you can have that as a separate "index" or "sort value" field (especially where sorting is something you want to control on a per-entry basis, like the library example in one of the articles sorting names using the indexing rule of the author's place of origin, or you want to sort a list of names that contain a mix of character sets).

For addressing people directly, e.g. via email or letter, you can provide them with an extra "how should we address you" field -- the best part about this is it means you don't have to guess how they want to be addressed, and is I think the most polite option, especially when you're dealing with a variety of cultural contexts in the same system.

I am always appalled when systems (built in the US) have difficulties with apostrophes in the names. I mean, have you missed all the Irish names that exist in the US?

It would be "fair enough" forgetting about accents when computing resources were limited, but to not deal with apostrophes? Really?

(I mean, ok, this story is not new, just look at the history of the https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1fu633/when_... )