I'd love to seem some kind of standardization around this. Perhaps the "persons" table doesn't have the name but rather the name is stored on a "names" table with an EAV model allowing for all kinds of conventions.
Know Thy Edge Cases, and all.
These are apparently not true, so I guess that "a Unicode field in a database" is not the correct answer for my application. So what is? As far as I can tell, patio11's position is that people should simply not gather names, which is an unreasonable position.
'This isn’t something that often happens to men.'
I can look past the fact that it's completely unsubstantiated, but is it even necessary in a post about names? Do you think the name of the actress was truncated because of her gender?
When people shorten my name, it's familiar and it's a relief because I don't have to smile through their awkward pronunciation.
I feel embarrassingly over-sensitive, but reading statements like these in tech articles is unnerving.
The point is, it should be your choice what you are called. Having someone else "take your name away" is just as demeaning as the article says. And yeah, I think actresses' names are shortened a lot more often than male actors'.
Error establishing a database connection
That statement sounds just as wrong as stating that if only a woman had been on the tech team or handling the database, that the Comicon registration system would have accepted all last names. Women are capable of deploying caching strategies just as men are capable of recognizing nonsensical name validation.
"The lovely gentleman at Rackspace just broke the crap out of my site when he UNPLUGGED the server my VM was living on."
Edit: I also have a female friend who I'd always known as Maggie Smith-Brown[1] and I always just assumed that she started as Maggie Smith and married Mr. Brown. Until I met her husband... Mr. Smith-Brown.
[1]not real name
That's actually incredibly common in Spanish-speaking parts of the world.
It used to be that women would add "de Foo", where Foo is the last name of their husband, but nowadays it's fashionable to drop the "de", because that implies ownership ("de" is the Spanish equivalent of "'s")
It actually gets way, way more complicated, but that's a tl;dr: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_naming_customs
Shouldn't the name be: Tarah Wheeler van Vlack ?
I guess that in the US the Dutch/Flemish conventions do not apply, and the spelling choices will depend on the person/family.
Sure, I was a little worried when the guy at the DMV warned me that the California system would always register my name wrong -- adding 'Van' as part of my last name along with my middle name. He told me to just mention it and everything would be fine.
Sure, it was pretty annoying the next time I went into the DMV and the guy blew me off, saying the system was fine. Sure enough, a few weeks later, my license arrived in the mail, incorrect. Unfortunately, they won't change it unless I bring them a passport or a birth certificate and pay to get it fixed, but it's not the end of the world. That change has persisted, and now my Washington State license still has my wrong name. Oh well.
Because my last name is much longer then the author's - 27 characters including spaces - it's been truncated since Kindergarden, and my University ID is still misprinted. Oh well.
I guess my point is that it's not the end of the world, there are bigger fish to fry.
Inappropriately adding the "Van" (which in Dutch is written with a lowercase v) is typically something Americans of Dutch origin did to make their name sound more interesting to Americans.
But for those looking to process Dutch names (or other cultures with similar construct), those names are sorted by the part behind the "van", i.e., "Jan van den Brink" (yes, it gets more complicated) will expect to find his name under "B".
The New York City neighborhood of "Harlem," for example, is a Dutch name even though in Dutch it's spelled Haarlem, and the original name for the place was Nieuw Haarlem. It's more precise to say that it's the English spelling of a Dutch name, but most people find that level of precision needlessly detailed.
I have no problems asserting that "Van Vlack" is an American spelling of a Dutch name.
[1] As a developer, I got into the habit of calling non-English letters as "special characters" until someone pointed out that these characters are only "special" to people who don't use them.
I'm about to start a new project, I'm thinking of two fields "Legal Name" and "What should we call you?", both with special characters allowed.
But then you can't search by last name, and I think a lot of our users would be confused if names were in order lexicographically by first name.
For a bootstrap proof-of-concept project, I might expect names to be a pair of strings with no spaces in them. This'd cover (at a guess), 95-98% of US users.
For a startup, I might expect two strings, one of which can be blank, each of which contains 0-50 unicode characters. This at least adequately support (at a guess) 99-99.99%
For a government organization, maybe a single string, 1k unicode characters, and a way to snail-mail in a different name if yours doesn't fit that definition? That might be a bit extreme for a local government, but something like the IRS, where you have no choice but to use their service, has to push the limits of permissiveness.
But not everyone's name follows the same format. My wife has two middle names, one of my friends has three middle names, his wife has two given names and a middle name, and my father-in-law goes by his middle name.
And this convention is not true everywhere. Wikipedia has a list of articles for how names work in various cultures:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_name#Naming_convention
As an example, here's how it works in Russia (note the diminutive form, where the given name depends on the social status of the person they're addressing):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_personal_name
Of course, in lots of parts of the world, especially east Asia (e.g. China, Korea) it's common to put the family name first.
In general, the answer to "What is your name?" is "Who's asking and why?". If you need a person's name, you should ask for it in one of three ways:
1) What is your full, legal name? (e.g. Jonathan Anthony Smith Jr.)
2) What should we normally call you? (e.g. Jon, Mr. Smith, Johnny, Tony, Junior)
3) What name should we use when billing your credit card? (e.g. Jonathan A. Smith)
You should only ask the ones you need (don't need a full name? don't ask), and they should all of these should be free form with generous length limits and accept any Unicode text.
Sorry if my URL has extra stupid bits, I don't do this often
Unusually, I do feel the need to disagree with the inference that this is evidence of a gender bias in the tech industry. While our industry clearly has a massive gender bias (towards men, obv) and I feel strongly that it's something that needs to be highlighted frequently, I don't think that false positives are beneficial. I think this is a gender-neutral problem, and I think the gender talk is confusing and distracting to the very real problem of Western-centric design and development.
http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/ap.html
and provides a lengthy list of manglings and mishandlings.
I think I know what you mean even with the site being down.
