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Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
[Quote]:
So, as a public service, I’m going to list assumptions your systems probably make about names. All of these assumptions are wrong. Try to make less of them next time you write a system which touches names.
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I find it hilarious how people lashed out in the comments “so what should we do?” and “who would need all these rules?” when all the guy said: next time think before you implement name handling.
Instead of assumptions, make decisions.
But that flew over the head of a lot of the commenters.
Another wrong assumption by programmers: No person has the family name “Or”.
In the scientific publications databases “Web of Science” and “Science Citation Index”, when I search for the publications of Dani Or at ETHZ, http://www.ites.ethz.ch/people/professors/danior the system breaks and I get the error message
“Search Error: Missing search term. Check your query to make sure search terms and boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) are used properly”.
Try it for yourself if you have access to Web of Science through your university library.