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Comment by Waterluvian | Hacker News Reader

Is there a decent modern argument for why names are split across 2-3 fields rather than “here’s a text field. Make your mark in unicode.” ?

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Marketing.

“We want to address them by their first name because it’s so much friendlier and personable”.

That’s all I can think of. Not exactly ‘decent’.

That's not hard to do properly though, you can just have a "Full Name" field and a "Nickname" field. Let the user specify how they would like to be addressed informally without baking in any assumptions about how names are structured.

> Let the user specify how they would like to be addressed informally

Also for formally addressing someone, you need a last name split off of the name in many cultures. Can't write "Very honored mister Schmidt, I regret to inform you that..." if you don't have both the information that this Klaus Schmidt identifies as male and that Klaus must be removed for cultural reasons

Nickname sounds like the real solution. Prefix it with "Dear" and let the user fill in the rest, including any mister/misteress/miss/misses they might want -- or not!

It has cultural significance and leaks information. People sharing the same "family name" are presumed to be family. Patronymics show in which way people are related (whether or not certain two people are father and child). Some names in some countries also leak gender and sometimes also martial status. Spliting the name into "given name" and "family" name allows people to change family name to signal significant changes (e.g. marriage) happened.

You could of course say it's irrelevant and should not happen, but it's fun and people like this kind of fun.

You could of course go full Myanmar and say "put whatever here and also it's about 70 bucks fee to change it whenever you want to whatever you want", but that opens a host of other administrative problems, as global demographic database luckily is not a thing.

> People sharing the same "family name" are presumed to be family.

If only they had ALTER TABLE people CREATE UNIQUE KEY uq ON people.family_name; back when these things were registered. Most Jansens ("son of Jan") in my country are related only to the same degree that you and I likely are

Some cultures order personal names and surnames differently. Here in the US, name order is sometimes swapped when a full name needs to be provided: “Last, First Middle” vs “First Middle Last”.

Years ago the Prime Minister of Japan, Shinzo Abe, requested that he to be referred to as Abe Shinzo. https://thediplomat.com/2020/09/abe-shinzo-or-shinzo-abe-wha...

In some cases, it's necessary for a business rule.

In New York State, you can change your last name when you get married. However, you can't change any of your other names. Also, your choice is limited to some complicated set of rules involving your spouses surname (and former surnames), hyphenation and your pre-marriage surname.

If you don't have to interface with anything else, it's probably fine. If you have any non-trivial integrations then you'll probably run straight into "but what's the FIRST_NAME and what's the LAST_NAME"?

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