Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)

https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/

by somenomadicguy • 10 years ago

37 43 10 years ago

I used to date a woman whose hippy mother decided that last names were slavery, she's the person who turned me onto this list. The experience really opened my eyes into the anglo/usa-centric nature of most app development best practices, and how complicated it must be to work as a localization engineer.

She suffered quite a bit, any call to a government agency, especially FASFA student loans (btw fuck you FASFA, fuck you), would often end up in tears after hours of pleading to them she was a real person, or explaining "just freaking search me this way, it's how they did it the last time I spent 2 hours on the phone with you). The only benefit is that having only one name makes it rather difficult to google/facebook stalk you.

tl;dr: Not everybody has a name like yours. Don't use "first name", "last name" for somebody's name. Just give it a 512-byte or larger UTF8 field, and move on.

Semiapies• 10 years ago

I do when I can get away with it.

dagw• 10 years ago

Tangentially, I'm always slightly uncertain about what to put when asked about my "first name" on official forms. While I have a first name it is not and has never been the name anybody has used for me. I've always gone by my second name, and if you where to ask for me by my first name no one would know whom you are talking about.

Basically do you want the the string returned by name.split()[0] or do you want the string which is the most commonly used identifier for me?

aninhumer• 10 years ago

In most official cases, what you they mostly want is the string which matches the one in other official documents about you. They will often also use it in communications, but having a separate field for chosen name would probably be more hassle than it's worth.

vidarh3• 10 years ago

I'd say you want to be consistent within the same context. Otherwise it's their own fault if they can't ask you for something more specific.

E.g. if they want a display name, they should ask for a display name. Most of the time people need only a few different roles, and you can always pre-populate default values based on doing a simple name split and letting people suggest more approriate alternatives.

Upside is that asking for specifically what they need addresses other concerns, such as e.g. parents signing up to something on behalf of their children, or someone needing to put another name of a shipping label.

vacri• 10 years ago

I would functionally disagree with 40 - by the time someone is in a position to be referenced by a computer, they'll have some way of being referred to, even if it's just a number. It's hard to imagine a truly nameless slave that is kept off the grid, yet still has a computerised individual reference somewhere...

somenomadicguy7• 10 years ago

One could change #40 to: You need your customers' names. I look at a name the same way I look at a username, more frequently than not it's a hassle you don't need to solve. In many applications a username, or even better, an email address, is the best UUID for a user.

We design apps to collect names by default, even when we don't need them and will never use them for any purpose, or at worse, the purpose we use them for is violation of privacy.

thr0waway12397• 10 years ago

Suppose someone calls in and tells you they want to cancel but forgot which email address they used for signup, what is the next piece of information you ask them?

cronopios2• 10 years ago

Ƭ̵̬̊ (The Artist Formerly Known As Prince)

majewsky2• 10 years ago

Previous discussions on HN:

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438472 (138 comments)

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10255610 (11 comments)

dirktheman• 10 years ago

I have a friend who's a refugee from Afghanistan. Apparently they don't use surnames there (or at least his tribe doesn't). When he applied for a visa my city council shifted his first name to his last name and he had to come up with a first name on the spot. His name is officially Peter Abdullah now.

somenomadicguy7• 10 years ago

Immigrant officials at Ellis Island used to give people last names based on their father's first name, or the name of the city they come from.

Also, Armenians didn't have last names until recently, so you'll meet lots of people with names like "Gevork Gevorkian" or "Ohan Ohanesian", or their name will be shifted to the right, adding an "ian" to the end (think the prefixed O' in irish names), and give them anglicized names.

cronopios2• 10 years ago

At my uni there is a student (from India, IIRC) that doesn't have any surname.

Some of our software didn't like that, so we checked her passport, and sure enough, her full name was merely her first name.

somenomadicguy7• 10 years ago

Oh man, I really feel for her. Dealing with the various immigration agencies must have been a nightmare. I bet they ended up officially changing her name to "Firstname Firstname", which is what we tend to do in the states..

This bugs me, because if a name is supposed to be a unique identifier, then part of it's existence is to feed the ego. "This is ME! I am Jean Valjean!"

When you then you change somebody's name to fit your short-sighted database constraints you're pretty much saying, "You don't matter as much as our programmers' decisions matter, now move along 9430"

jbb555• 10 years ago

Ugh this again. No. People have a first name, and they have a last name. Each name consists of a reasonable number of ascii characters. If they decide they are special and don't wish to conform to this scheme how is this my problem?

What if I decide my "name" is the first billion digits of PI? Are you going to add that to the list of names that you need to support? No?

thr0waway12397• 10 years ago

I hope you are not downvoted.

In economics, people talk about the problem of 'sorting and labeling' and how that is an unconscious reaction (which does unfortunately lead to bias) but it helps immensely in the overall productivity of an entire system.

When people expect you to design special systems which increases the overall entropy, I wonder if they realize that you too incur a cost for creating that system. I say this as someone whose name is constantly butchered during my dealings with American entities, and I am not generally asking them to modify their system to accommodate my name so it remains unaffected. Thankfully, in most cases, I actually have a choice of whether I should continue having dealings with such entities. (I don't know what happens in cases where you don't, like, say the DMV).

rimantas2• 10 years ago

I hope he is downvoted for oblivion. And you too. That's a wrong approach to tacle (or rather not to tacle) a problem.

K0nserv4• 10 years ago

If the argument is economics and system complexity you should favour a single name field over first and last name though. It's one of those rare occurrences where something is both simpler and the better option.

rimantas2• 10 years ago

In the world the number of people whose names do not consist of ASCII characters only wastly outnumber those whose do.

thr0waway12397• 10 years ago

Interesting that you chose to respond only to the part of the commenters' statement where you had a reasoned response and ignored the second part of their statement altogether.

TorKlingberg• 10 years ago

The list goes to far and makes people overreact like you with some kind of "Screw this! Get a normal name or get lost!".

That is the wrong way to handle this. You don't have to support everything in the list. If your product is only for people in America you can expect them to have a name written in latin letters. You can ask them for a surname and a given name, and they will be able to fill it in, but may be slightly annoyed. You should allow apostrophes and accented letters, but it's really not hard these days with UTF-8. ASCII is too limited.

As you support more countries you will need to support more kinds of names.

somenomadicguy7• 10 years ago

I'm curious why should you expect them to have a two-word name written in latin letters? You are the most diverse country in the world, every language, nationality and tribe is represented there.

At least in the states, legal regulations on names vary from place to place. In the state of Texas, if you're a lawyer, you are legally required to tell people this, most commonly done by adding the Esq abbreviation for Esquire at the end of your name. I have a friend who's official name (of course I've obfuscated this) is "Dr. Firstname b. Lastname PhD, Esq.".

Arnt• 10 years ago

One of the old classics, I think it was Plauger's book on POSIX, dealt with this in the l10n chapter. One of the examples was "the only customer for this software is the US government, so it only needs English" leading to "then they discovered that the US goverment includes that of Puerto Rico".

How many latin letters are there anyway, 26? 600? I read the latter number in an essay on what typesetters used to keep. Is ' an English letter, as in O'Malley?

K0nserv4• 10 years ago

It don't think that'll be true in any first world country that has had any form of immigration. Storing a single UTF-8 value is simpler than storing two ASCII values in any case, pick the lazy option.

EdiX• 10 years ago

    names are central to our identities

I have never experienced this.

odabaxok• 10 years ago

Similar lists:

Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses: https://www.mjt.me.uk/posts/falsehoods-programmers-believe-a...

Falsehoods programmers believe about time: http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programm...

hnur• 10 years ago

On time:

35. The rate that time passes at one point in the universe is the same relative to any other point in the universe.

I once talked to some co-workers of mine who doubted that relativity is real.

Hinrik• 10 years ago

Falsehoods programmers believe about prices: https://gist.github.com/rgs/6509585

kdeldycke• 10 years ago

Trying to compile a list of those at: https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

Fell free to send pull requests! :)

CarolineW• 10 years ago

Previous discussions:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11370046 (1 comment)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10255610 (13 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10094603 (1 comment)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9239656 (3 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7365517 (2 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4079837 (5 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1438472 (138 comments)

Also:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8909878

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7063812

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5994098

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2898965

danbruc• 10 years ago

This makes me think you should maybe just have a few fields for names for different use cases and maybe provide an example next to it to see it in context.

  Name on Invoices       John Miller, PhD   John Miller, PhD / Ocean Drive 13 / Tahoa 12345

  Name for Phone Calls   Mr. Miller         Hello Mr. Miller, how may I help you?

Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)

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