Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names – With Examples

I like reading these lists and find them very interesting. At the same time, I would caution anyone from building software that blindly tries to accommodate every point in these lists. Every software has a set of requirements, and a target market. It should be built to meet those requirements and anticipate strange situations, but within reason. This is very context sensitive. There is no one ruleset. At the same time, it should be possible to address edge cases in…

A few years ago we were required to pass Microsoft's certification exams, one of the options was to do it online. Their requirement was that the name/surname in the application form had to be identical to what's in your ID (you also had to attach scans of your ID). The problem is, we're from Russia, and the form didn't allow Cyrillic letters, and there's only Cyrillic letters in a Russian ID. We had to fly all the way to St.Petersburg…