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Comment by JohnDotAwesome | Hacker News Reader

Names are hard. My name is John. Programmers get really confused when I tell them that. "Did you know there's another programmer named John? You probably should have researched names before you decided to go with that one"

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Yup, just like with people, name clashes in computers won't cause problems!

    # apt install docker
    Reading package lists... Done
    Building dependency tree       
    Reading state information... Done
    The following NEW packages will be installed:
      docker
    0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
    Need to get 12.9 kB of archives.
    After this operation, 45.1 kB of additional disk space will be used.
    Get:1 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/universe amd64 docker amd64 1.5-1build1 [12.9 kB]
    Fetched 12.9 kB in 1s (24.9 kB/s)
    Selecting previously unselected package docker.
    (Reading database ... 13860 files and directories currently installed.)
    Preparing to unpack .../docker_1.5-1build1_amd64.deb ...
    Unpacking docker (1.5-1build1) ...
    Setting up docker (1.5-1build1) ...
    root@testing:~# docker
    bash: docker: command not found

For people who don't understand what happened here:

In Debian ecosystem, "docker" is a system tray application: https://icculus.org/openbox/2/docker/

Docker, the container software, is packaged as "docker.io".

Funny story... We had a contractor start named "John Smith" and this guy just could not get on the domain, receive email, etc. All his shit was just not working until like a week after his start date.

My team doesn't handle new user creation, and it's a big company, where sometimes other teams may as well be other companies. I kept getting tickets from this guy and he's reporting that none of his stuff works. There's nothing I can do, but I try to help the guy out.

Anyway, a week later his stuff works. I guess whatever team does the new user creation never planned for there to be more than four employees with the same name, and their automation broke on "johnsmith5". Sigh.

I'm trying to imagine the architecture that led to this.

Trust me, I couldn't imagine it either. My guess is it actually probably broke on the second John Smith that joined, and they had to manually configure all subsequent John Smiths, and they just wait until they get a ticket.

Alternatively a dev thinks gotta handle user name collisions: "try creating user... hmmm if exists append ‘1’ and repeat with 2..n+1, oh uhhh, better stop after, idk, 5 times (last time my test borked and filled up the database with username ‘(null)’ last time, sigh)". Programmer takes lunch.

A plain fixed size C array embedded in some data structure somewhere?

Doesn't seem that big a stretch to imagine.

This would be more like Windows batch jobs or Powershell scripts. I honestly think it just cannot handle duplicate names at all, and they wait until they get a complaint. When we were acquired, we had a person on our team receieiving emails for a different user with the same name that previously existed in the company that acquired us.

But look, if I started a company called McDonald's, everyone would be confused and it'd probably be illegal. Complaining on forums about names is the open source community's alternative to trademarks.

Yes, if you were living in a world where the bank would only give an account to the first person named "John" to sign up, you should have researched names first. It will be fun dealing with file associations over the .xar extension.

Companies used to coordinate to make sure they didn't conflict on port numbers, Apple used to run a database for ensuring that creator codes were unique, etc. Now one of the biggest tech companies can't be bothered to check if they collide with another large tech company in a sparsely populated namespace.

Namespaces can help with that. For example, I note that you aren't just John, you're John Fawcett. And you probably have a middle name (or two, or more).

I bet you've worked somewhere with a collision on John. Did you adopt a handle, like John F, or maybe JohnDotAwesome?

I really wish I did have more than one middle name, both of which starting with `R` (indeed, my middle name does start with R). Maybe then as a J.R.R. Fawcett I could write fantasy novels.

Oh I'm one of the lucky ones then. It's funny, I often wish I had fewer names. I swear— very few forms ever allow room for two middle names or two middle initials.

R.R.A. Fairley

But I'm a little more into science fiction

Pen-initials are quite common. Iain M. Banks wrote SF; Iain Banks wrote the more mainstream stuff.

The larger "person's name" namespace includes the first name and last name. And people do generally treat it as a surprise when they find someone with the same name.

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