The real issue is that too many programmers apply their own cultural norms to the issue of naming, in ways which privilege their particular culture at the expense of others'.
(You want to be able to identify people uniquely? Fine: allocate them a globally unique ID string within your own system. Then let them link this to whatever the hell they want -- be it an Anglophone forename-middlename-surname string sequence, or something entirely different that fits their cultural requirements. Once you get into designing a procrustean name storage architecture and insisting that everyone uses their true name, then you are inflicting your own culture's naming requirements on them, which is offensive at best. Especially when it isn't necessary.)
Sure. You go ahead and create a "culturally sensitive" system that allows people to create randomly changing names based on multiple character sets and unlimited length. On an infrastructure that was put in place in 1980 with a minimal budget just to get something running quickly because it was supposed to be temporary.
Most systems aren't going to be built with infinite flexibility. Some might argue that wouldn't even be possible. And perhaps it has absolutely nothing to do with the programmer's own cultural norms, but the system they are programming on, the budget they are dealing with, and their level of competency. Not every action that is offensive to a particular group is done deliberately to offend that group or even with the knowledge that it could be offensive.
Meh. The .01% comment is perfectly relevant. Should the system be re-organized from the ground up and new licenses issued to everyone in the USA to accomodate last names of her length? I can't wait to carry around my postcard size license in my back pocket.
The system was written to work for the 99.9% of users it serves, the other 0.01% will unfortunately have to deal with the problem of being outliers.
Wrong. My argument is that there are constraints we have to deal with when programming. Those constraints make it difficult or impossible to investigate and satisfy every possible naming convention on the planet. If you happen to exclude some possible naming scheme or the one character set system you're working with won't tolerate much flexibility, that doesn't make you an offensive, rude human. And if you happen to make a judgement call and limit naming flexibility to a certain reasonable expectation, that also doesn't make you an offensive, rude human. We are under no ethical obligation to expend orders of magnitude more cost and effort to satisfy orders of magnitude fewer individuals. There's a limit. Flexibility isn't free.
It's only non-deliberate while you are ignorant of their problem. As soon as you are, it becomes part of your equation, and you're liable for underestimating its importance.
Where's that quote about lack of empathy masquerading as "brutal honesty/pragmatism/anti-PC-ness"...
But that's culturally insensitive to the Anglophone forename-middlename-surname string sequence, which cause users to expect "Zebediah Anderson" to sort before "John Smith".
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Optimize for the use cases you expect: if you're making a phone book for middle America, that's a different problem than a social network for Russia.
Requiring people to remember their ID numbers reeks of prison and/or Hitler; that would be substantially more offensive than asking people to do business under a name that can be entered on a keyboard and matched without cutting-edge image processing algorithms.
You're right, thank god US citizens aren't given a unique number at birth that they'd later need to attend school, get a driver's license, buy a house, or get a job.
Social Security Numbers are applied for voluntarily by the parents of the baby. Usually the hospital puts together the application from what I understand, but the parents can request that the hospital not do that. If a parent makes such a request, they usually have to educate the nurses that Social Security Numbers are not required by law, and are voluntary. If required for taxing purposes, a person without a Social Security Number will have to apply for an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN). There is even a process to remove yourself from the Social Security program once you are 18, or convert to a religion that does not approve of it.
I would also venture to guess that not having a SSN or even an ITIN to use in place of the SNN is an automatic disqualification for attending school, getting a driver license, buying a house, or getting a job.
That's needed to verify unique identities when doing specific official business with institutions. It's not what's going to show up when you log into your work computer, send an email, use Facebook, or any of the thousands of places that computers use our names.
> People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
At this point we've gotten into absurdity. Yes, supporting Chinese people and Hawaiian people with superlong names and people with first/last vs last/first or hyphenated or non-alphanumeric or whatever... all the stuff that can be supported with a single string of UTF-8? That's all reasonable, and there's a very real progrem with programs that don't support those kinds of names.
But going over the line into names that can't be expressed in any form of text known to a computer? At this point, the ludicrous exaggeration is only barely further than the silliness included in the "Falsehoods" list.
He's not mocking "you have to support a half-German half-Chinese person who was raised with an Inuit nickname". I'll happily support Prof. Dr. Ms. 陳 (ᒥᓂᔅᑕ) Wolfeschlegelsteinhausenberdorft III. That's fine.
But the "Falsehoods" article says that isn't enough, and is pretty much describing "seven different names, each consisting of some kind of personal scribble that changes depending on the phase of the moon".
Normally I'm the first to complain about racism and those kinds of insults, talking down to people who are just too much trouble to bother with. But that "scribbles" comment is literally outlining the lengths the article describes.
Did you read the link in cstross' reply? I'm not mocking anything. Some combination of those rules would actually require this type of naming situation.
Did you really just rationalize this using a blog post? To quote #36 on the list you are referencing: "You’re kidding me, right?"
Scribble: to cover with scribbles, doodles, or meaningless marks. Names aren't meaningless, and TMK names don't change depending on the time of month. By phrasing things the way you are, you are making generalized (and fictitious) blaming statements about something that is very personal. And you got called out on it.
This entire sub-thread is a reply to part of my response that is centered around that blog post, so yes, I rationalized it using said blog post. Did you really just ask that question because you wanted to pretentiously infer some kind of unreasonable rationalization?
Addressing all of the issues on the list pretty much boils down to accepting a scribble as a valid name. And if you are going to accept point 8 on the list that people's names change at any non enumerable event, then that is just as difficult as a name that changes based on the phase of the moon. Worse, actually. Moon phases are at least predictable. The point is, I'm creating a plausible scenario that fits the suggestions in the list. It is not necessarily fictitious, and it is absolutely in no way worse than the list's expectations.
Please identify how I made any type of "blaming statement". If you're going to call me out then go ahead and call me out. As far as I'm concerned I've been accused, not called out.
The "scribble" may have been given meaning by becoming this person's name, but if it's not in any character set, it probably doesn't already have meaning as a character in any known written language.
I cannot adequately express my dislike for this kind of mockery. Seriously, fucking stop it.