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Comment by sixhobbits | Hacker News Reader

"First and Last name capitalised"

Seems like someone hasn't read the famous "Falsehoods Programmers Believe about Names"[0]

[0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-...

I mean, it’s basically a helpful hint there to maximize the chance that both parties include the same names with the same capitalizations

And it's a unhelpful suggestion to butcher names that aren't correctly formatted that way.

I mean, you would want to handle this correctly for a "real" thing, but this is just a cute demo and that's gonna be a close enough approximation to work for this I think.

Maybe they did, got confused and gave up. How would you deal with 4, 11, 12+13, 14 and 18 here?

Quite simple: you don't deal at all. That's zero assumptions about the name. Let them eat cake and enter whatever they want. The user should know their sweetie well enough to guess what they will enter as own name. This is an assumption about their level of mutual knowledge, true, but not one about the naming scheme.

This is a design decision that will very likely lead to missed matches, bold of you to assume it's desirable but even that doesn't answer the entire ordeal. How are they going to enter the name, have you read 11?

On the contrary, there is a very strong and completely invalid assumption: that Alice will type her name in exactly the way Bob typed her name, and vice versa, that neither will misspell it, that either both will use the official name or both will use the same nickname.

> 4. People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.

The relationship between person and name is one-to-many

> 11. People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.

You can implement custom characters, i.e. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_Use_Areas or have a process for exceptions

> 12. People’s names are case sensitive. 13. People’s names are case insensitive.

You can store this as an attribute

> 14. People’s names sometimes have prefixes or suffixes, but you can safely ignore those.

This can be other fields if you're trying to structure the data, or you can simply store the entire name as a contiguous field.

> 18. People’s names have an order to them. Picking any ordering scheme will automatically result in consistent ordering among all systems, as long as both use the same ordering scheme for the same name.

Don't string compare names as a test for equality.

The obvious response to this is: that's too hard (/impossible to do). But that's just the reality of the situation. These issues are not necessarily possible to solve. #21 in particular makes this application very broken even with very plain vanilla western names.

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