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Comment by CameronNemo | Hacker News Reader

You seem to be assuming that each field:

1. Could not contain whitespace.

2. Would have a minimum length.

TFA specifies neither of these requirements. You could have someone's first name (which I would recommend calling given name) be "Pablo Emilio" and their surname be "Escobar Gaviria". Or alternatively you could have someone with a given name of "Sukarno" and an empty string for the family name. Patronyms and matronyms are sort of ambiguous, but would probably be categorized as surnames.

I use a single name field, but I don't think a given name and surname split is crazy.

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My favorite way to do things is to just ask for a "full name"; and then, separately, a "calling name" (i.e. "what do we call you?")

The "full name" is for putting in the c/o part of a mailing address; while the "calling name" is for showing beside your profile picture or for saying "Dear [name]" in a mail-merge.

Neither of these is a nickname. They're both your "real" name. But neither of them are your legal name, either. You're free to make either of them whatever you want, and to make them both entirely unrelated to one-another. They're just two forms of "your name" that you might expect to see in one place or another. And we can ask for them, so that we can then spit them back out at you in the situations that call for them.

Doing things this way skips the entire minefield of "given names", "family names", titles/appellations, etc. You've got use-cases for someone's name? Ask the user directly, for each use-case, what text they'd like to appear. There's not too many use-cases, really; you only need to ask a couple such questions, in the end.

This is the correct answer. The question to ask is, what are you doing with the names? Splitting first and last only makes sense if the thing you’re doing is listing people by last name. Sometimes you do that! But not always and certainly not in all countries.

No, I think GP is assuming that names are very complex, and even the assumption that people have a first and last name isn't always correct. You can just use a name field, and let people supply the name they want to use.

What do you really need a first and last name separated for anyways? Sorting? A salutation on correspondence? Sorting by last name isn't usually important[1], and you can generally use a full name in a salutation.

Depending on the domain needs, you choose the right representation. If you expect US citizens and want their name as entered on their tax returns or social security card, then you match what those can hold and note to the user that you are expecting those values. If you're just collecting a name to have a name, why put an extra constraint in there that doesn't matter?

1: Not to mention you then get to mostly ignore the craziness that is utf-8 and combining characters and cases and sorting.

> What do you really need a first and last name separated for anyways? Sorting?... Sorting by last name isn't usually important...

When paying customers / clients want to sort by last name, because “that’s how we do things”, then you sort by last name. So it’s only important when you want to make money.

Edit to add: your customers also don’t care that someone somewhere has 6 first names and no last name. “This wasn’t a problem with our old software.”

If customers need it, then it's a requirement. Nothing I said indicates you should leave out customer requirements. In fact, I specifically alluded to including separate names in cases where it's needed.

Sometimes the customer is you or your org, and in those cases it may not be a requirement.

Exactly as you say: if customers (that is, the people paying for the software, not necessarily the people filling in forms) need it, then it's a requirement.

The point is that while sorting by last name (say) might not seem important to an engineer, and requiring a last name might seem outright stupid to a person filling in a form, nevertheless it is often an important requirement. Frequently folks will observe some "stupid" form, and link to some "falsehoods engineers believe about X" document, suggesting that engineering "got it wrong", when in fact they have simply misunderstood who the software is actually for.

Wait till you get into some Dutch surnames "van der Kleij", "van den Bosch", "de Jager" which are not patronyms. They would still fit into "first name, last name" pattern. Because you assume what is last name can have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tussenvoegsel

Though a lot of pages in NL have separate field for it.

Or German ("von Trips") or Italian ("De Sica") and possibly other countries.

Anyway, people who move to other countries have to adapt. For the database of a local business is often a good idea to stick with the format of official documents because everybody has to fill out forms on government websites, regardless where they were born. Ids, taxes, healthcare, schools etc.

Arabic culture will sometimes adopt a name after you have a child as “father of X”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kunya_(Arabic)

Yes, Arabs use "Ibn" and jews use "Ben". Slavs use father's name and "ich" suffix. People in Iceland use different kind of patronimics.

You can either use just one name field if your logic doesn't need a name or surname or provide two fields for name and surname and let the user handle the splitting.

I have three first names. When I fill a form, if it's an official form or if it's for business purposes I fill all my names as first name, if not, I only write the name I use.

Ibn is a patronym, but a kunya is the other way: your name is the name of your child. E.g. Palestine’s Abbas is also “Abu Mazen”, the father of Mazen.

Exactly what I meant, the fields CAN contain whitespace. The first_name, last_name is one that I find useful

Much of the official paperwork in my life has "[First Initial] [Middle name]" in the first name field, which works (usually). But why should I have to do that? It's a pain in the ass.

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