zlacker

> In fact, authorities in New York never actually wrote down anyone’s name, they just checked each immigrant against the ship’s passenger list, which would have been compiled by employees of the steamship companies. That means that your grandpa Szymańczyk turned into Simmons before he even set foot on the boat.

So many people refuse to understand this. It's a fact they simply reject.

> I was born in Mexico City, and my parents named me Leonel Giovanni García Fenech. It might sound a little baroque to Americans, but having four names is standard in Spanish-speaking countries.

I'm as Anglo as they come, and I have four names. In practice, yeah, I often have to choose a middle name if a form has space for one (1) middle initial or middle name.

But all this hits upon something I don't like about the "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" article: Programmers usually don't believe things, programmers implement things, and those things will believe what the client believes, on pain of the client finding someone who will go along with their vision, no matter how grand, blinkered, purblind, or otherwise constrained that vision may be. Blaming programmers is, therefore, very often wrong.

>>msla+(OP)
I've come around to arguing for "name" to just be a text field. No rules. But so many people seem to think their systems need surname, firstname, middle name, etc. all separated. I rarely see an actual need for this. If you want to know what to call them informally, have that be a separate field that you prompt them for.

>>SoftTa+W1
> I've come around to arguing for "name" to just be a text field. No rules.

This is the morally correct solution, but governments run on forms and forms run on fields and fields were created by people who knew, as a matter of absolute ontological certainty, that names are FIRST MIDDLE-INITIAL LAST with a possibly blank MIDDLE-INITIAL. As for letters, if it isn't on Ethel's typewriter it doesn't exist.

If you want to protest the form, line forms over there, face-down, nine-edge first.

>>msla+(OP)
> But all this hits upon something I don't like about the "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names" article: Programmers usually don't believe things, programmers implement things

These lists are called “Falsehoods programmers believe about...” because ultimately, when the rubber meets the road, it’s a programmer who makes the decision to type it in, implement it, and ultimately cause the problem. Maybe, to be more accurate, the lists should be called “Falsehoods programmers perpetuate by not pushing back against clients and product managers.”