> What do you want me to do about it? When you write code that accepts names, don’t bake in assumptions that violate these falsehoods.
OK, so what I'm asking you is how I am meant to handle names which are characters that are literally impossible to represent with a computer.
I responded this to a different thread also, but:
Probably you can't, because the person couldn't even type their name in. So if you're writing an application, that's one that's outside your control, and you can't do anything about.
I consider breaking the fields up well worth the trade-off of people without a surname having some difficulty with it, because that situation is extremely rare, and the user experience is significantly worse if, e.g., I can't meaningfully sort names because I have no idea if you put your given name first or last, etc. There's also really nothing about JSON that should dictate that you can't handle the name "Null" or…
Did you read the article? It is meaningless to "sort" names across countries. Most languages have their own sort rules, and some languages have multiple sorts depending on the specific usage! Sorting is almost never what you want. Are you printing out a phone book onto dead trees? No? Then you do not need to sort names. Just do substring search, and you've already got a UI that is 10x better than having people flip t…
I guess I'm not too worried about sort order being incorrect, since it already is incorrect 99% of the time anyway—most programs sort strings "1" < "12" < "2", whereas that's... wrong. It annoys me several times per week, but we've all accepted it and moved on. Apple's OSes do it right, but that's about it—and even still, if you're in a shell, it's probably back to being wrong.
"with examples" => Follows up by not giving examples to a bunch of entries "Confound your cultural relativism! People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly accepted standard for names. And will your software only be dealing with people named by your society?" "I can safely assume that this dictionary of bad words contains no people’s names in it. This is a common mistake – many “bad words” are not bad words…
> People in my society, at least, agree on one commonly accepted standard for names. For context, patio11, the author of the original list (without examples), emigrated to Japan and has noted that it is (was?) common for computer systems there to have no idea what to do with his English name. This included his Japanese employer, who apparently assumed all employees would have Japanese names. > I can safely assume tha…
I am a Spaniard (long & convoluted name) living in Japan, unfortunately I know what patio11 is talking about. I literally have to call today a place to "fix" an application after being rejected twice because "my name was wrong", we'll see how the spelling of my 31-character-long name goes.
Did you read the article? It is meaningless to "sort" names across countries. Most languages have their own sort rules, and some languages have multiple sorts depending on the specific usage! Sorting is almost never what you want. Are you printing out a phone book onto dead trees? No? Then you do not need to sort names. Just do substring search, and you've already got a UI that is 10x better than having people flip t…
I guess I'm not too worried about sort order being incorrect, since it already is incorrect 99% of the time anyway—most programs sort strings "1" < "12" < "2", whereas that's... wrong. It annoys me several times per week, but we've all accepted it and moved on. Apple's OSes do it right, but that's about it—and even still, if you're in a shell, it's probably back to being wrong.