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Comment by teej | Hacker News Reader

For what it's worth, programmers do not have the tools to perfectly handle the complexity of human language. It's a hard problem.

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Names are an incredibly tiny subset of human communication, and if we were having a beer at the bar, I'd take a swing at arguing that they're not part of language at all.

Unfortunately they are the part of communication that we hang the whole communication on. If we identify people by any other part of the conversation we would have the same trouble I'm sure.

I don't know, name systems seem to quickly betray their origin in little sentences of specificity in the languages used at the time, before they became systematized according to common western practice (if that even happened, depending on culture).

John? John who? Oh, "John the Smith" with time, the is dropped - the name is carried forward despite people's profession, people post-facto come up with systems for "First" and "Last" names, but the order remains.

In Japanese, grammar flows the other way, "Ken of the mountain field" is written "Yama no Ta no Ken", "Yamada Ken" because of grammar though, the surname still comes first.

And the biggest one is Patronymic names that maintain the untouched grammar of specifying who you mean based on who's kid they are "Ori, Eric's daughter." = "Ori Ericsdottir", "Mateo's Luis" "Luis de Mateo", "O'Connor" "ibn `Amr" etc. etc.

A free text entry field would cover almost everyone.

Except people without a single canonical name, or those with no names. Doesn't solve ordering. Or a few more problems from http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b... I'm sure.

Websites that insist on forcing me to enter a first and last name always get abuse in the latter. What I call myself on websites is my business, not yours.

If at any point in the process they need to bill you for something, they have to ask for your first and last name because that's exactly what the credit card companies require. So there are use cases.

Personally, I don't see why any company is asking for a name if they aren't billing you for something or they aren't a social network.

I've had a Google, but can't find Zuckerbergs answer to this. Any idea?

I've never seen a credit card company ask for separate first and last names.

Sometimes I think Hacker News forgets the world doesn't start with LA and end with Miami.

http://developer.authorize.net/api/reference/

firstName

First name associated with customer’s billing address. Required only when using a European Payment Processor.

> they have to ask for your first and last name because that's exactly what the credit card companies require

No they don't, they ask for a single field, name on card which is a single string containing everything on the card.

No they don't, they ask for the full name on the card in a single free text field.

That would require the user information to exactly match the credit card information - which is dumb because it blocks a whole swathe of use cases (multiple payment methods, different person paying, paying by Paypal, paying by Apple Pay, etc.)

A text entry field on what? A browser? A native android app? A QT interface?

What language is processing the text? Java? C? JavaScript?

Where is the data going, what is the transmit format, what is the data store?

Answering these questions for ascii text is easier. Answering it for utf-8 is harder. Cobbling something together for a character encoding format that can handle the median human name is challenging.

Covering almost everyone isn't the problem, it's getting everyone in that is hard. There is a good link in that story about name assumptions. http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b....

A free text field doesn't catch everything in that list.

That, and we have bosses who don't believe us that a single string for first and last name won't work for everyone.

Conversely (or is it inversely?), I've got a coworker whose entire, full, legal name is a single word. It just shows up twice in all of our systems.

What is his nationality, out of curiosity? Or was he born with name and surname?

BTW Just found this list, pretty short. Is it common in some societies still to have just one name?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legally_mononymous_p...

Indonesia's the most well-known example.

The other famous one is Burma - U Thant, third Secretary-General of the United Nations, was actually just called Thant, but nobody could handle that in 1961, so they stuck the Burmese version of 'Mr' on the front to make something they could recognise as a name.

I'm not sure, he works in a different office than I do. As far as I know, he's American, and I'm not sure if he had a mononym from birth, or if he changed his name.

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