Hacker News Reader

Comment by wglb | Hacker News Reader

One more item for the list: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

I love the "Falsehoods programmers believe about X" articles. They are basically ready-made failure test cases. Whenever a junior co-worker would say something like "I know! I'll just write our own date and time handling code." I'd point him at [1], let him stew on that for an hour or so, and then, sure enough, go back and lo and behold he's convinced to just use a ready-made third party library instead.

1: http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programm...

Poor time-handling also have big consequences as well. In Nevada, for example, overtime calculations use a rolling 24-hour period, and as a result many workers are incorrectly paid each year because their employer's system doesn't account for DST changes.

I'm all for good testing, and for encouraging programmers to think more carefully, but most of these items strike me as needlessly pedantic. My goal is to build software that works in practice. If I have the time to build in edge cases that accommodate super-minorities, I'll probably start by fixing my app in IE6 to pick up that extra 2%. My guess is that'll be a bigger uptick in signups than I'll get for somehow handling names that can't be represented by "all Unicode code points."

If you live in the U.S. and your name can't be represented by 7-bit ASCII (forget Unicode!), you've probably had to adopt an alternate name that can, or else you've spent a good chunk of your life banging your head against every private and public company that needs you to fill out a form. When you sign up for my app, you'll probably use that alternate name out of habit.

Your points best apply to situations where the end user is the same as the person named. While this may seem to be the case for most web applications, let's note the interesting results on, say, Facebook when trying to even search for already-made friends whose '7-bit use names' might not be the ones you expect. (In fact, I recall odd results from Facebook when searching without accents, which are generally require special attention to enter on a US keyboard.)

Further, if you live in the US doesn't mean you've lived there long. Are you ready to cope when the user hasn't settled on, or perhaps even understands, the need for said use name? Heck, US population is 4.4% -- who's focused on super-minorities, now?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com