> An individual has only one phone number
Always feel these lists include things no human actually believes.
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
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Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#12I find this category of posts ("falsehoods programmers believe about X") to be patronizing and unhelpful. Most of these lists (this one included) don't give good explanations and don't have guidelines for how to avoid the problems that are highlighted. It's usually just a list of condescending gotchas.
Really? While I personally don't need to work with phone numbers for my job, I found this list to be incredibly interesting. For many, this type of knowledge is often attained by making incorrect assumptions in your code/system design and having them proven wrong over time. Having a list like this which lays it all out for you in one shot is amazing.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#13>1. An individual has a phone number
Requiring a phone number one way for me to ignore your website or service (ie, Signal) forever. But if you do it I'm probably not your target demographic anyway.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#14Alright, guess I'll be using email verification
As long as you don't try to validate the email address I entered. The list of gotchas for email address parsing is impressive too. (e.g. "Cool Address"@example.store is a valid email)
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#15> An individual has only one phone number Always feel these lists include things no human actually believes.
Programmers make stupid assumptions all the time... usually because they are focused on some other more difficult problem and they assume some other problem like this is easy and they don't have to think much abt it, so they don't.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#16I have/had a Facebook account with a phone number. The account was left unused for a few years. Recently, I used my E-mail to reset its password, unfortunately, since the account was abandoned for a long time, the system flagged my activity as "suspicious" automatically, and asks me for confirmation using my phone number.
But I no longer own that number.
And from the customer Q&A forum, I realized I was not the only one - it is almost impossible to find an actual human from Facebook to solve this kind of verification problem.
All I wanted is to delete it, but I can't. Now, my account becomes a zombie, can't be used, can't be deleted, and has lots of personal information. All thanks to the falsehoods Facebook programmers believed about phone numbers, and its non-existent "customer [0]" service.
I've heard Google has similar issues [1], if the machine works, then everything is fine, until you need a human...
Repeat after me: fxxk Facebook.
[0] because I'm the product, not the customer?
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18886804,
and read this comment, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18887548
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#17So basically phone numbers are one or more alphanumeric fields.
You can put symbols in phone numbers.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#18> An individual has only one phone number Always feel these lists include things no human actually believes.
It’s not that people believe this - it’s just that they don’t think things through when building something. This point was mention because there are plenty of CRM/contact-management systems that only have a single phone number field per contact. Or worse: Outlook, which is expressly marketed as a contact management tool, with its arbitrary restriction of 3 phone numbers and 3 e-mail addresses per contact - or how all contacts have to have first and last names (how do I have a “company” contact? Etc). Point is, don’t be like Outlook.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#19I find this category of posts ("falsehoods programmers believe about X") to be patronizing and unhelpful. Most of these lists (this one included) don't give good explanations and don't have guidelines for how to avoid the problems that are highlighted. It's usually just a list of condescending gotchas.
I think you're being a bit harsh in this case.
I don't think many of these have a useful explanation that would stay within the useful scope of a list like this. Knowing the local implementation details of Argentina dialing requirements, and why the 9 needs to be dropped, most likely involves long-gone phone carries, organic implementations, and local politics.
Expecting guidelines for most all of these is not realistic since many are just "how it is". For most, the guideline is an obvious "don't do/expect this". If your list is mostly comprised of unexpected behavior, then "falsehoods x believe" is probably ok.
As for avoiding the problem, you can't always avoid reality; sometimes you have to accommodate its weirdness, especially when dealing with > 100 year old systems with massive interoperability problems.
Re: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016)
#20I have/had a Facebook account with a phone number. The account was left unused for a few years. Recently, I used my E-mail to reset its password, unfortunately, since the account was abandoned for a long time, the system flagged my activity as "suspicious" automatically, and asks me for confirmation using my phone number. But I no longer own that number. And from the customer Q&A forum, I realized I was not the only…
I do wonder how EU's "right to be forgotten" comes into the play here. Could it be used in your case?