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Comment by perl4ever | Hacker News Reader

Things that come to mind offhand:

- First initial and last name are used for some things, such as usernames.

- First name and last initial are used for some things, such as public displays where you don't want to have the full name

- Last name is used to sort lists

- Names are entered differently due to error or constraints in different places, so you want a way to search the parts that stay the same. Sure, you can imagine everybody just had a string field, but it can't happen all at once. And on a global scale, there are definitely people who will enter their name differently anyway.

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The listed reasons for separate fields contains assumptions that may not always be be accurate.

How do you tell an initial from a single character name?

How do you sort by last name if a person has one word for their entire name?

Assuming names are spelt the same or have a fixed length is also not accurate.

It’s all a trap - using one string might be a terrible solution, but it might also be best.

How do these usernames / public displays work for people without two names? When you sort by "last name" do you really mean "surname"? Are you going to add more fields for searching and sorting keys, so when 鈴木一朗 comes along you can search by "イチロー" or "SUZUKI" or 4 or 5 other reasonable search terms, and where is he going to be sorted?

It sounds like you're just kicking the problem downstream a tiny bit, and making it slightly worse by adding another point which enforces an invalid data model.

Your last sentence is certainly true but I don't see how separate fields makes it any better (or worse).

There are people who only have one name, so anything that relies on having two names is essentially broken.

You commonly see companies with user names that started as first character of first name + last name, and then you see later ones that don't follow the pattern when they realize they can't make it work.

> There are people who only have one name

My wife for one. At the very least make the last name field optional.

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