[HN Gopher] Falsehoods programmers believe about names - with ex...
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Falsehoods programmers believe about names - with examples (2018)
Author : thewarpaint
Score : 35 points
Date : 2021-11-07 20:45 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (shinesolutions.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (shinesolutions.com)
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| Did I miss the falsehood about family name always following
| personal name? (Doesn't apply to Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or
| Hungarian names.)
| dang wrote:
| Discussed at the time:
|
| _Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names - With Examples_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18567548 - Nov 2018 (169
| comments)
| swayvil wrote:
| By the way, John Wyndham (author of The Day of the Triffids.
| Mentioned in the article) also wrote a novel titled, "The Kraken
| Wakes". Which is a hilarious, messed up and excellent piece of
| scifi full of early 20th century flavorful goodness.
| kgeist wrote:
| 41. Surnames like "Null" don't exist:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12426315
| Svip wrote:
| Programmers need to learn from bureaucrats of the 19th century.
| When bookkeeping of the people truly became a thing in the 1800s,
| industrialised nations sent out bureaucrats to collect the names
| of people in villages. Unfortunately, people seldom had enough
| names to fill in the forms the bureaucrats had. The idea of a
| family name was not something bestowed to nor necessary for a
| lowborn. If you're the only Jack in town, why bother with any
| other name than Jack?
|
| Not contend with simply filling in Jack, bureaucrats would simply
| come up with a last name for them. Or - if they felt so inclined
| - ask the person to come up with one themselves. They would often
| chose their occupation. Americans know that a lot of modern
| family name spellings in the US are the result of careless
| bureaucrats at Ellis Island.
|
| Back then, family names, house names, last names and surnames
| weren't necessarily the same thing. One might have more than one.
| You may be of one House, but your last name was Jackson (son of
| Jack). Also somewhat inconvenient for these bureaucrats with few
| fields on their forms. And also, stop changing last name from
| generation to generation.
|
| Though, fortunately for these bureaucrats, unlike modern
| programmers, when the map did not fit the terrain, they could
| simply alter the terrain.
| notum wrote:
| Some airlines do this, they ask that you anglicise your name
| for the boarding pass.
| andrewem wrote:
| Family names weren't changed at Ellis Island.
|
| See eg this from the New York Public Library:
| https://www.nypl.org/blog/2013/07/02/name-changes-ellis-isla...
|
| (The mandated adoption of surnames is a pretty complex topic
| and of course proceeded in different ways in various times and
| places.)
| [deleted]
| kube-system wrote:
| > I fear that part of the reason that this blog post had less
| impact than I hoped was that Patrick did not give examples of how
| each assumption can be false.
|
| I think the reason is that many assume that these cases are niche
| and not something they need to worry about.
|
| Which might be the case, or might not, depending on the
| application. But either way, using celebrities or historical
| figures is not a great way to convince anyone otherwise.
| ted-pap wrote:
| In Greek first names are conjugated. Also last names change based
| on gender.
| elchief wrote:
| A personal name is either a Polynym (a name with multiple
| _sortable_ components), a Mononym (a name with only one
| component), or a Pictonym (a name represented by a picture - this
| exists due to people like [Prince][1]).
|
| A person can have multiple names, playing roles, such as LEGAL,
| MARITAL, MAIDEN, PREFERRED, SOBRIQUET, PSEUDONYM, etc. You might
| have business rules, such as "a person can only have one legal
| name at a time, but multiple pseudonyms at a time".
|
| Some examples: names: [ {
| type:"POLYNYM", role:"LEGAL",
| given:"George", middle:"Herman",
| moniker:"Babe", surname:"Ruth",
| generation:"JUNIOR" }, {
| type:"MONONYM", role:"SOBRIQUET",
| mononym:"The Bambino" /* mononyms can be more than one word, but
| only one component */ }, {
| type:"MONONYM", role:"SOBRIQUET",
| mononym:"The Sultan of Swat" } ]
|
| or names: [ {
| type:"POLYNYM", role:"PREFERRED",
| given:"Malcolm", surname:"X" }, {
| type:"POLYNYM", role:"BIRTH",
| given:"Malcolm", surname:"Little" },
| { type:"POLYNYM", role:"LEGAL",
| given:"Malik", surname:"El-Shabazz" }
| ]
|
| or names:[ {
| type:"POLYNYM", role:"LEGAL",
| given:"Prince", middle:"Rogers",
| surname:"Nelson" }, {
| type:"MONONYM", role:"SOBRIQUET",
| mononym:"Prince" }, {
| type:"PICTONYM", role:"LEGAL", url:"http:
| //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/af/Prince_logo.svg/13
| 0px-Prince_logo.svg.png" } ]
|
| or names:[ {
| type:"POLYNYM", role:"LEGAL", given:"Juan
| Pablo", surname:"Fernandez de Calderon",
| secondarySurname:"Garcia-Iglesias" /* hispanic people often have
| two surnames. it can be impolite to use the wrong one. Portuguese
| and Spaniards differ as to which surname is important */
| } ]
|
| Given names, middle names, surnames can be multiple words such as
| `"Billy Bob" Thornton`, or `Ralph "Vaughn Williams"`.
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_(musician)
| user-the-name wrote:
| You can very easily have multiple legal names, as "legal" is a
| national concept and you can have multiple citizenships, each
| one with a different legal system and thus potentially a
| different legal name.
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| There are other examples where an individual can have no
| name. If you do not complete your test of manhood in the
| cultures that have one you may not be assigned a name.
|
| Looks like GP didn't read the list.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| An empty array might then suffice, but surely this outcast
| has a sobriquet, like "that loser without a name"
| elchief wrote:
| Which is exactly what I said
| firebaze wrote:
| This is so old. Welcome, https://xkcd.com/1053/.
| emodendroket wrote:
| > This particular example name [Tanaka Tarou Tian Zhong Tai Lang
| ] is perhaps best known as the name of an alien in an anime
| series (and a manga). There have also been real people with this
| name.
|
| Huh? That's a bit like saying the name "John Doe" is "perhaps
| best known from being the name of a character in a movie." It's
| just the stand-in, "generic" Japanese name that's used in
| examples. If an alien had the name in a cartoon it was probably a
| joke about the alien going out if its way to appear ordinary, the
| way the characters in Third Rock from the Sun were named Tom,
| Dick, and Harry.
|
| Anyway, this article always kind of rubbed me the wrong way. OK,
| maybe someone's name is one character that's not possible to
| represent with Unicode. What do you want me to do about it?
| kgeist wrote:
| A few years ago we were required to pass Microsoft's
| certification exams, one of the options was to do it online.
| Their requirement was that the name/surname in the application
| form had to be identical to what's in your ID (you also had to
| attach scans of your ID). The problem is, we're from Russia, and
| the form didn't allow Cyrillic letters, and there's only Cyrillic
| letters in a Russian ID. We had to fly all the way to
| St.Petersburg to pass exams offline in a Microsoft-approved
| certification center, instead of just doing it online in our
| office. Another option was getting a travel passport (it contains
| a Latin transliteration), but the deadlines didn't allow us to
| wait for up to 1 month (maximum time for issuing a travel
| passport here).
| R0b0t1 wrote:
| They refused to accept a romanization? If so that's doubly bad.
| Excusing technical deficiencies is one thing, but preventing
| people from working around them is indicative of a high level
| organizational failure.
| kgeist wrote:
| Yes, it had to be identical. The problem with romanization of
| Cyrillic is that there's no commonly accepted standard, and I
| suspect the employees who process the applications were very
| unlikely to be Russian, so they would have no idea how to
| match our romanized variant to what's found on the ID scans.
| At least if they allowed Cyrillic in the submit form, they
| could have compared it visually as a set of pictograms, no
| need to know Cyrillic by heart. And it wasn't some US-only
| application thing we ran into by mistake, it talked about
| providing identification documents "of your country". But for
| some reason, they excluded all countries which don't use
| Latin alphabet.
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| In some countries, women have different last names than men do.
|
| Eg. in macedonia, traditionally a person would get their fathers
| name as their surname (so if the fathers name was "Petar", and
| the son was Dragan, the lastname would be roughly translated to
| "Dragan of Peter"). Because there are different forms for
| feminine and masculine words, The son would be named "Dragan
| Petrovski", and the daughter (Eg Marija) would be named "Marija
| Petrovska".
|
| This tanslated to modern times means, that if "Marija Ilijevska"
| married "Dragan Petrovski", she would then be named "Marija
| Petrovska". Their sons surname would again be "Petrovski" and
| daughter "Petrovska".
|
| So basically matching parents and their kids by their last names
| has to take in account the -ski or -ska form .
| eesmith wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name gives an Icelandic
| example of Stefan Gunnarsson with children named Harpa
| Stefansdottir and Robert Stefansson.
|
| Bjork's name is Bjork Gudmundsdottir, daughter of Gudmundur
| Gunnarsson and Hildur Runa Hauksdottir.
|
| These use the genitive -s followed by either -dottir for girls
| or -son for boys.
|
| In Iceland, matching parents and their kids by their last names
| doesn't work that well.
| [deleted]
| isbvhodnvemrwvn wrote:
| In old Polish there was also a special form of name for
| unmarried women, so for example:
|
| Jan Kowalski has a daughter, Anna Kowalska.
|
| When she is young, she is called Anna Kowalszczonka, Kowaliczka
| or Kowalowna depending on who you asked (and you can't reliably
| reverse these forms into the original name)
|
| When she is grown up, she is called Anna Kowalska.
|
| As it happens, the country was part of the Russian empire, so
| she's also called Anna Kovalska or Anna Kovalskaia, depending
| on who you asked.
|
| When she marries Jan Kowal, she is called Anna Kowalowa or Anna
| Kowal.
|
| When Jan Kowal dies and she marries Wawrzyniec Slowacki, she is
| called Anna Slowacka. But her husband is from Austria-Hungary,
| so he's also called Laurentius Slowacki somewhere in his
| documents, even though he never uses this name for anything.
|
| Their son Stefan moves to Lithuania, but even though he's
| ethnically Polish, Lithuanian government requires him to have
| "Steponas Slovackis" printed on his documents.
| DonaldFisk wrote:
| Also in other Slavic countries, e.g. Poland (-ski/-ska),
| Iceland (-son/-dottir), and sometimes in Scotland (Mac-/Nic-)
| and Ireland (Mac-, Ni-).
| Zababa wrote:
| > In some countries (notably French speaking) it is convention to
| write a person's surname in all caps to make it clear which part
| of the name is the surname.
|
| This is a French-specific thing? I didn't know that. I really
| like it, it makes it easier to know which part is the name and
| which part is the family name.
| malshe wrote:
| I knew this as a French-specific thing when I worked there and
| I used to love it. Haven't seen it anywhere else though.
| LazyOne wrote:
| Yes I've seen this in some French and Belgian companies.
| msbarnett wrote:
| It's not fully French specific -- conventionally,
| transliterated Japanese family names are rendered in ALL CAPS,
| particularly when it's unclear whether or not the name is being
| presented in Japanese-style family-name-first order to western
| audiences who may otherwise confuse the given and family names.
| senkora wrote:
| I've also seen it in the CIA World Factbook. I didn't realize
| it was a French thing.
|
| https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/japan/
|
| Lots of info on the page, but the relevant part:
|
| "head of government: Prime Minister Fumio KISHIDA (since 4
| October 2021 )"
|
| Edit: Another example:
|
| https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/albania/
|
| "head of government: Prime Minister Edi RAMA (since 10
| September 2013); Deputy Prime Minister Senida MESI (since 13
| September 2017)"
| notum wrote:
| Gotcha. Un-validated unicode text boxes for names in forms from
| now on. After all, someone could be named like the contents of a
| 64MB binary blob.
|
| Compromises are unavoidable in web development.
| mike_hock wrote:
| Unicode text boxes with no validation other than a (generous)
| length limit and unicode validation is exactly the right
| approach. Arbitrary assumptions and limitations littered
| throughout the code is not.
| number6 wrote:
| Oj yes litten QmFieSBUYWJsZXM=, we call him.
| vanous wrote:
| Qk9CQlkgVEFCTEVT
| david422 wrote:
| Nullable, of course.
| goto11 wrote:
| A more realistic example for 40 ("people have names"): Newborns
| might not have a name. Lots of systems might have to handle
| newborns.
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