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Comment by zamalek | Hacker News Reader

> "Just have a single "name field" and maybe preferred name, which is not the same."

> This is the way to go.

Agreed. Does anyone know of any reason to care about first/last, apart from it being part of My First SQL Database and sating our inner desire to create pointless taxonomies?

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For one thing, delivery drivers and similar can get confused if they don't know which part of the name they should expect on the doorbell... (especially if both parts of your name are uncommon)

I don't think there's an easy fix to this. Not everyone has a first and a last name, but in many places, cultural conventions (or legal practice) assume that you do.

Sorting. Though I don't think there's a culture-agnostic way to do this, either.

Not universally, no. The closest for English-language use is to put a spurious comma between family and given name (e.g., "Cixin, Liu" for Cixin Liu).

In an ebook management system I've been developing, I use a full_name and a sort_name field for authors/editors/contributors, because books are a reasonable thing to want to sort by author names.

Even this has some culturally confusing elements, doesn't it?

For example, in my studies I had cause to read many books by Hans Urs von Balthasar. Nobody ever referred to him as "von Balthasar," just "Balthasar," but his books were always sorted by the "von."

Even this has some culturally confusing elements, doesn't it?

It's never not going to.

> Nobody ever referred to him as "von Balthasar," just "Balthasar," but his books were always sorted by the "von."

I'm pretty sure I've seen a by-name sorting scheme that excludes these sorts of prefixes for alphabetisation purposes. Of course, then you have to second guess whether you are using such a sorting system :)

I believe that the von should be included in sorting in some languages and not in others. It's a Dutch/German difference, though I cannot recall which is which.

Largely cultural, I think, and being able to use each as might be appropriate within the culture. For example, using "Hi, <first name>" when sounding casual, but using "Dear Ms <last name>" when trying to sound formal. Nothing that's likely to be mission-critical, but a natural inclination based on cultural upbringing that we may not even realize is affecting our product design.

People already mentioned sorting.

Another reason is being able to generate various forms automatically: i.e. from "Fstname:William Robert, Lstname:Smith" to generate "William Robert Smith", "W.R. Smith", "Bill Smith", or just "Bill" without storing any of these variants separately.

Of course this may fail if "William" prefers to be called "Will", not "Bill"...

Interfacing with external systems which require first/last, I suppose.

This, we recently had to break up our "name" field into first/last name because we work with banks that require first/last name as separate fields. When we reference an account it has to match their records exactly.

This. Many US government agencies (and therefore their forms and APIs) use FML.

So, our software has a whole pile of names... FML, preferred, mailing, formal, sort name, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. It's a mess.

If you mean for yourself, yes. Do you want to have an easy time when you interact with a reality that assumes things about you, or do you want to spend a lot of time and effort accomplishing basic tasks as an outlier in a system that doesn't expect you? If you mean for your database, it depends on purpose. The same reality applies. Think about integration, for example.

Having to interact with other systems that expect first and last names to exist.

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