[thephyber]

> Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

So if you take these to heart, even a tiny weekend project will take near infinite time to handle all of these cases.

It would require infinite space, every possible supported character set, a massive fuzzy-logic search engine, etc.

Humans handle complexity by avoiding it until it becomes a pressing need. The first pass at understanding is always an oversimplified model. Usually we make additional passes, hopefully with progressively more nuanced and educated models.

Knowing that your system will run into problems in the future is sometimes enough. Deferring problems until they are actually significant business impacts is a reasonable strategy.

This applies to "Falsehoods Programmers Believe About {Names, Addresses, Phone Numbers, etc}".

[thomastjeffery]

> even a tiny weekend project will take near infinite time to handle all of these cases.

A "tiny weekend project" assumes, by definition, a tiny userbase. The point is to assume nothing about a dataset, because even dozens of seemingly reasonable expectations about names are wrong.

The point of the article is not to tell you to immediately write perfect code, but to make you aware of your code's limitations.