Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses

Post by ghaff » Sun, Jan 18, 2015, 5:46 PM UTC

mgkimsal wrote: post #52

UrMomReadsHN wrote: post #23

Is it common to believe that post codes don't start with zero? All of New England (ME, MA, NH, CT, RI, VT) have zero starting post codes. Plus apparently a part of New Jersey. Map here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZIP_code Also, since it brought up naval vessels, here's the addresses of all US Navy ships: http://www.navy.mil/navydata/ships/lists/ship-fpo.asp Anyways, the post office does a wonderful job delivering m…

I got in to an argument in school with my computer programming teacher. A BASIC course, we were having to design a system to accept an address, and I was treating my ZIP code as a string. IIRC, something like 50 INPUT "Your ZIP code?", ZIP$ Everything was reviewed via handwritten code and flowchart before we were allowed to type it in in the lab, and I was told "ZIP code is a number, but you're putting it in to a str…

Post by ghshephard » Sun, Jan 18, 2015, 5:56 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #68

ubernostrum wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is where most of the "falsehoods programmers believe" articles fall flat. The thing to do is not try to design a single form that accommodates every possible address or name or whatever. The thing to do is examine your use case, design a form that works for, say, 99.9% or more of the people you want it to reach, and then if you really want to get the last 0.1% have someone who can do customer service and has acc…

"Punt and let customer support handle it" is a pretty lazy solution, in my view. Additionally, what a developer might think of as a "99.9%" solution is more often than not a 99% solution, or a 90% solution. With enough customers, dealing with everyone who can't use your slapped-together form will be more expensive than doing it right. Software doesn't become great by assuming someone else will handle the edge cases a…

  Name
  Address Line 1
  Address Line 2
  City
  State
  Country
  Postal Code

Post by Rygu » Sun, Jan 18, 2015, 6:02 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #36

Rygu wrote: post #28

Developers can't know everything there is to know in the world. Developers aren't suppose to know specific stuff like this. Some parts of modern society are easy to digitalize, other (often historical) parts aren't. I think it's up to entrepeneurs to find ways to solve these problems, and create a better world by doing that. Don't blame/shame developers for stuff like this. It's not even remotely fair. When you're tr…

Well, after reading this article and other variations on the theme that's one less set of mistakes to make. Even if developers are not demigods they shouldn't be above learning. Entrepreneurs have very little chance of fixing this, it's mostly a local government thing and since it isn't actually broken I highly doubt that something will change. So 'deal with it' is the appropriate response.

Post by pbhjpbhj » Sun, Jan 18, 2015, 6:05 PM UTC

Post by ghshephard » Sun, Jan 18, 2015, 6:05 PM UTC

izacus wrote: post #33

FooBarWidget wrote: post #5

I read this article a long time ago and I took it seriously. So instead of asking for address, postal/zip code, city, state/province, I just put up a big text area labeled "Full address" so that people have complete freedom about what to fill in. 80% of the users ended up only filling in their street address, not their postal/zip code, city and state/province, even though they're from countries where (most?) addresse…

At least it helps if you don't block on empty fields then - I keep getting annoyed when sites demand I enter "state/province" for international shipping when my country doesn't have that concept. Or demand that I enter 6-digit postal code when we only use 4. Or not being able to handle non-ASCII chars. And things like that - helping people is fine and useful, but blocking a user because you set up assumptions valid o…