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Comment by Mordisquitos | Hacker News Reader

I fully agree with you. Another gripe to add to the list is the Anglocentric expectation made by American software [0] that any full personal name with three words must necessarily mean (given_name) (middle_name) (surname), to be displayed as "Givenname M. Surname" and initialised as "GS" (skipping the ostensible "middle" name). Nevermind the diversity of conventions across cultures [1], every name must obviously follow American cultural expectations.

[0] Also British, Canadian & Australian software, but with few exceptions (Shopify, Atlassian…) few of these have such global presumptions as US software products.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36989683

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A funny/sad aspect of it is that I get the impression that violation of the /^(?<first>\S+) (?<middle>\S+) (?<last>\S+)$/ custom isn’t even all that rare in the USA because it’s still moderately common to reuse names and add ordinals, a practice which has largely fallen out of practice in other English-first countries (so that violation of the convention has become rarer in them, though certainly there are other deviations—e.g. I have a great aunt with no middle name).

Poor old John Smith Ⅳ (pronounced “John Smith the Fourth”) probably gets turned into the initials “JI” (because let’s be real, he actually wrote “IV” rather than “Ⅳ”).

I also know Americans who go by their middle names because everybody in the family has the same first name, with the first name turned into an initial before their middle name. Usually software can handle this by entering "J Bob" in the first name field, but not always. Sometimes software asks for first name and middle name separately, and then you know you're going to have trouble because another system thinks "J Bob" is your first name and the two won't match.

I think a single field for the entire name would be ideal, with an optional second field for "how should we address you?" so that the software doesn't have to play games with asking gender and breaking out the last name to fill out a form letter with "Dear Mr. Smith, ..."

Names are not strings. Until software developers get that through their heads, the situation is going to stay broken.

I consulted on a project for a US-based airline. The horror show that is Sabre infests everything, and Sabre doesn't understand any character that didn't exist in six-bit BCD

> Names are not strings.

So what are they?

Strings are a primitive type. Names are not strings in the same way Dates are not strings. They can be implemented, represented, and printed as strings, but they have behaviors and meaning that the primitive string type does not.

To use another example, a binary tree is not an array, although it can be implemented using an array.

Money is not a floating point value, and woe to the programmer that tries to use float for money.

There are international standards for representing dates, but none exist for names. Names do not abide by any scheme or set of rules, therefore the only appropriate data structure for storing names is a unicode string. Anything else will exclude people.

Point me to the international standards for representing money.

ISO 4217

TIL

Without making assumptions about the origin of the name, you can't impute any structure onto that string, can you? In that case, it is still simply a string.

> making assumptions

We have i18n to give context, no assumptions needed.

The main problem with the single field idea is alphabetisation.

Time for a timeless classic piece of writing: Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names [1].

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

I've encountered software that just assumes everyone MUST have a middle name. I'm German, I have no middle name. Some software (well, online forms) make this a "hard" assumption, so you have to put an "X" or something in the middle name field; it'll scream otherwise

I am an American and have no middle name and I cannot recall any software that forced me to enter one.

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