#programming #names Aargh
Throw the programmers in the sea
67 comments
Has she been able to do whatever it was ... I would have been making a few phone calls ... My offspring have had a few problems with certain documents by not having middle names ... even been told that "everybody has a middle name" ... My offspring haven't been christened/baptised either ... Shock! Horror! @MyView yes, she used a longer form of that name. I've run into the middle name thing before, I've got two of them, much US-based software used to insist on mandatory one middle initial - VISA cards still do. Friend at uni (jane smith) had no middle name so had a student ID card that was name based as "jxsNNN" where x stood for bad software @ajft clearly those programmers have not read this https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ @samhainnight i had a colleague at uni of sri lankan extraction who had 8 names (I think, maybe it was 10), his nominal "last name" was up around 20 characters long. he always had fun with official forms when they asked "please enter your full name" @ajft I had to squish my middle names into one to get it to fit on my driver's license. To this day, I cannot fill out any government form on line because my name doesn't fit the standard format. @samhainnight I have two middle names, once long ago a friend was working at the admin section of the uni I studied at, she found two files of my records, "Lastname, Firstname, middle1" and "Lastname, Firstname, middle2". One of these folders had one piece of paper, the other one had everything else. I believe she quietly merged the two and threw out one (allegedly, unofficially, etc) @ajft @samhainnight when I asked for my police records using FOI I eventually got three back because apparently the cops couldn't spell my last name. The first one I got back had it misspelled (but the record was me) so I asked again using common misspellings and got more matches :) @ajft @JustTooOdd @ajft It’s the most reasonable thing to do (hurling programmers into the sea, that is). I feel shame being associated with this sort of thing, and have absolutely been in meetings/code reviews where validation was approached from the perspective of what’s possible rather than what’s useful. Anyway, obligatory: https://xkcd.com/2030/ @ajft ignoring the terrible choice of requiring a minimum of three characters... What's with the "or an array type"? I wonder what happens if you try sending back a form response with multiple first names? (which site is this anyway?) I'm so freaking tired of lazy development. Other engineering fields have actual discipline. Whatever happened to the concept of craftsmanship, of creating things worth taking pride in? @grendel84 it was acquired by Google in a hostile takeover, then killed off when the PM needed a new project to get their next promotion. @ajft Names, addresses, dates & time, passwords. So many people don’t have a clue about them. And occasionally a programmer can try to explain it to a manager and designer, but gets overruled anyway. Until a few years later some customer complaints and then it’s the programmer’s fault. @Stefan_S_from_H @ajft this is the reality. Programmer is usually the tiniest gear in this process. Heck I got into arguments about missing ids in an API for proper _required_ cross reference of some datasets and had to argue my case in front of management - an uphill battle because changes to the API are "so expensive". They added the missing ID after I left and someone else had to pick up the pieces. @ajft I got this with my e-mail. Apparently having 2 letters before the @ also sometimes causes trouble @ajft introducing them to my friends Q (first name only) and R (last name only) oh and M (her middle name) And no special characters allowed, the good old 26 letters of the English alphabet should be fine for everyone.
@ajft Reminded of someone whose surname is "Null" ... and how to properly validate text entry: "Jennifer Null’s husband had warned her before they got married that taking his name could lead to occasional frustrations in everyday life. ... When Jennifer Null tries to buy a plane ticket, she gets an error message on most websites. The site will say she has left the surname field blank and ask her to try again." https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20160325-the-names-that-break-computer-systems @ajft Also "loved" once that a website told me my name was not real because it had a tilde: ~ 💢 @ajft @luciedigitalni You know that might even be a new falsehood programmers believe about names… It also sometimes sucks to be a Ян (Yan). I know one who adds a ъ to his name in this case, pre-revolution-spelling style. |
@ajft
Ahhh ...ya gotta larf :)
Unless your name is Jo ...