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Comment by aed | Hacker News Reader

Relevant patio11: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-b...

I'd love to seem some kind of standardization around this. Perhaps the "persons" table doesn't have the name but rather the name is stored on a "names" table with an EAV model allowing for all kinds of conventions.

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I'd love to see some of the supporting arguments for some of those not because I doubt them, but because I'm curious.

Know Thy Edge Cases, and all.

I have two friends who didn't have last names until they moved to the US and were forced to make some up.

In parts of India it's common not to assign a child's first name when they're born. My birth certificate says "baby Beri". "Satvik" didn't come about until I was ~6 months old, and I have relatives who had no official first name until they were 12-14 years old!

When the solution to your problem is EAV, you now have two problems. Possibly three, if performance matters.

Stop reposting that link. If someone tells people that they are doing things incorrectly, and refuses to explain how to do things correctly, then they are unhelpful and useless.

"Correctly" will mean different things for different problems. This list gives you things to consider so you can make the right choice for your application.

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

These are apparently not true, so I guess that "a Unicode field in a database" is not the correct answer for my application. So what is? As far as I can tell, patio11's position is that people should simply not gather names, which is an unreasonable position.

You don't have to fix every problem for every application. If you don't need someone's name, don't require it (maybe an email address will do). Maybe you only care enough to implement Unicode code points. The problems you actually need to worry about depend on what you need to do with the data in your application.

But not everybody has an email address! Oh noes!

No, seriously, this is a bad link, it's got no advice, and it's not helpful.

Here's some serious advice: Put a field in your database, make it Unicode, bound it according to your DBA's advice on how much space you have to spare. A couple thousand code points should be plenty. Then give your users a single field called "Name" and have it accept up to a couple thousand Unicode points. Done.

No, it's not at all helpful in the sense of telling you what you should do. But what it's trying to do is kick you in the butt and make you think for yourself, advising you to discard some of the preconceived notions all of us have about a subject. If it doesn't make you do that about validating names in programming, you're in the wrong profession.

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