Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010)

This is almost as bad as the address question. I go by my middle name (my parents thoughtfully gave me my father's first name and even middle initial, which has caused no end of confusion for many a credit bureau over the years). Unfortunately, the State of Indiana's birth certificate system assumes beyond any possibility of override that (1) everybody with children has a first name, (2) that first name has no spaces in it, and (3) the middle name…

I've stopped using my real name. My last name has an apostraphe, and at this point I'm just sick of websites rejecting it and then forcing me to refill in all of my information. So, now I drop the apostraphe. In high school my school ID was completely broken. It printed <first half of last name> <first letter of last name> <middle name> <first name>. They ended up putting a quotation mark instead of the apostraphe - somehow the machine…

I wish these things came with examples. I'd love to hear more about how a culture that doesn't name children under 5, do their child rearing and generally go about their life. Also, who registers to a website, but doesn't have a name? At some point you need to choose an identifier if you want to interact with other people or their services, and you might even need to conform your identifier to something that someone can comprehend and reproduce…

I have a friend who's a refugee from Afghanistan. Apparently they don't use surnames there (or at least his tribe doesn't). When he applied for a visa my city council shifted his first name to his last name and he had to come up with a first name on the spot. His name is officially Peter Abdullah now.