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I hope you are not downvoted.

In economics, people talk about the problem of 'sorting and labeling' and how that is an unconscious reaction (which does unfortunately lead to bias) but it helps immensely in the overall productivity of an entire system.

When people expect you to design special systems which increases the overall entropy, I wonder if they realize that you too incur a cost for creating that system. I say this as someone whose name is constantly butchered during my dealings with American entities, and I am not generally asking them to modify their system to accommodate my name so it remains unaffected. Thankfully, in most cases, I actually have a choice of whether I should continue having dealings with such entities. (I don't know what happens in cases where you don't, like, say the DMV).

If the argument is economics and system complexity you should favour a single name field over first and last name though. It's one of those rare occurrences where something is both simpler and the better option.

But is it the better option? Suppose x% of the human population has a name which can be reasonably decomposed into first and last names. I honestly don't know what x is, but say it is about 90%.

When you store it as a single string, which order will you choose? Will you have delimiters between them? Would they still be in effect when the person's name has more than 2 parts? If you are ever in a situation where you need to sort by name, will you do it by first or last name? What if there is a need for the other option to the one you chose? Can you reasonably guarantee that you can identify family members if you ever need to? When the customer tells their name over the phone, will it slow down your customer service people if you display the entire name in a way which they are not usually familiar with?

1. There is no order, just use whatever the user entered. In general don't get smart with this data just treat it as a single blob of text.

2. Sort by the whole thing

3. No you can't guarantee identifying family members any more than with a first name last name system. If you need that it should be an additional part of the system. Presumably for the 90% of people who does have a typical first name, last name combo you can still identify family members in the same way.

4. Just introduce free text search for this field if you need to find people.

I realized that I am in agreement on point number 1 - don't get smart with this data, in which case the other points are not very relevant.

But suppose you are working at a place where people are keen on getting 'smart with the data', your replies do increase the entropy if only to the extent that 'we have this idiot programmer who thinks he is too smart to use first and last names as we have always done and is breaking all our reporting systems and is causing hell for our customer service agents'.

:-)

Yeah if you are intent as a business on getting smart with the data it's much easier for everyone to just get smart upfront and ask the user for the data you want. This is not very inclusive though and has a clear anglo american bias. One might argue that this is a manifestation of the lack of diversity in the industry as whole. I think the list is aimed more at changing the perception and believes about names so that systems designed from scratch change rather than aiming to change existing systems that have a clear first name/last name convention established already

rimantas 3568 days ago

I hope he is downvoted for oblivion. And you too. That's a wrong approach to tacle (or rather not to tacle) a problem.

TorKlingberg 3568 days ago

The list goes to far and makes people overreact like you with some kind of "Screw this! Get a normal name or get lost!".

That is the wrong way to handle this. You don't have to support everything in the list. If your product is only for people in America you can expect them to have a name written in latin letters. You can ask them for a surname and a given name, and they will be able to fill it in, but may be slightly annoyed. You should allow apostrophes and accented letters, but it's really not hard these days with UTF-8. ASCII is too limited.

As you support more countries you will need to support more kinds of names.

somenomadicguy 3568 days ago

I'm curious why should you expect them to have a two-word name written in latin letters? You are the most diverse country in the world, every language, nationality and tribe is represented there.

At least in the states, legal regulations on names vary from place to place. In the state of Texas, if you're a lawyer, you are legally required to tell people this, most commonly done by adding the Esq abbreviation for Esquire at the end of your name. I have a friend who's official name (of course I've obfuscated this) is "Dr. Firstname b. Lastname PhD, Esq.".

Arnt 3568 days ago

One of the old classics, I think it was Plauger's book on POSIX, dealt with this in the l10n chapter. One of the examples was "the only customer for this software is the US government, so it only needs English" leading to "then they discovered that the US goverment includes that of Puerto Rico".

How many latin letters are there anyway, 26? 600? I read the latter number in an essay on what typesetters used to keep. Is ' an English letter, as in O'Malley?

It don't think that'll be true in any first world country that has had any form of immigration. Storing a single UTF-8 value is simpler than storing two ASCII values in any case, pick the lazy option.

rimantas 3568 days ago

In the world the number of people whose names do not consist of ASCII characters only wastly outnumber those whose do.

Interesting that you chose to respond only to the part of the commenters' statement where you had a reasoned response and ignored the second part of their statement altogether.

vorotato 3567 days ago

Well the first part wasn't a rhetorical statement.