Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names | Kalzumeus Software
13 comments
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It's all reasonable stuff except maybe:
People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
I don't see how you could avoid this this in software that needs to ask the user their name.
I think it's definitely a good idea to avoid using names wherever possible, and definitely don't try to do anything clever with them.
When necessary, software can just be clear:
- "in unicode, what should I call you?"
- "in unicode, who is making this credit card transaction?'
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Users: "I don't speak unicode"
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Haha, yeah, I didn't mean literally telling them that. More like giving them a text field that can only contain unicode characters, which is pretty standard.
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Programmers: "u{004A}u{006F}u{0068}u{006E}"
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You can do that when you control the frontend UI. Then, you can set up the input field for their name, applying input validation.
But I would rather not rely on telling the user, in hopes they understand and comply. If they have ways to do it wrong, they will.
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One of the all-time classics! I think all devs should read this.
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It's solid but I've always preferred the similar list about date and time - some of the answers to this list are just "Yea, but what do you want us to call you."
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And the others it spawned : https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
13 comments
My (least) favorite in this category is email addresses. It's astonishing how many developers screw this up by trying to validate an email address by some means other than sending a message to it.
100% agree.
™@tlduser-at-fqdn@domain.tld."user with spaces"@domain.tld"user@notdomain"@domain.tldendswitha_@domain.tlduser+tag@gmail.comunicodedomain@🤡.tldAll of those are valid, and the know-it-all developer's shitty regex won't cover most of them.
Except lots of email services won't take a technically correct email anyway.
The problem is that if you send a message just blindly, you can be tricked into sending spam to millions of addresses. I do one thing that prevents that, but does violate the standard, I verify there's only 1 '@' in the address.. this technically prevents people with '@'s in their name, but they probably find it impossible to do anything with that address anyway.