Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names
13 comments
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My favorite in this category is email addresses. It's astonishing how many developers screw this up by trying to validate an email address by some means other than sending a message to it.
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100% agree.
™@tld
user-at-fqdn@domain.tld.
"user with spaces"@domain.tld
"user@notdomain"@domain.tld
endswitha_@domain.tld
user+tag@gmail.com
unicodedomain@🤡.tldAll of those are valid, and the know-it-all developer's shitty regex won't cover most of them.
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The problem is that if you send a message just blindly, you can be tricked into sending spam to millions of addresses. I do one thing that prevents that, but does violate the standard, I verify there's only 1 '@' in the address.. this technically prevents people with '@'s in their name, but they probably find it impossible to do anything with that address anyway.
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It's all reasonable stuff except maybe:
People’s names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
I don't see how you could avoid this this in software that needs to ask the user their name.
I think it's definitely a good idea to avoid using names wherever possible, and definitely don't try to do anything clever with them.
When necessary, software can just be clear:
- "in unicode, what should I call you?"
- "in unicode, who is making this credit card transaction?'
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Users: "I don't speak unicode"
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Haha, yeah, I didn't mean literally telling them that. More like giving them a text field that can only contain unicode characters, which is pretty standard.
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Programmers: "u{004A}u{006F}u{0068}u{006E}"
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You can do that when you control the frontend UI. Then, you can set up the input field for their name, applying input validation.
But I would rather not rely on telling the user, in hopes they understand and comply. If they have ways to do it wrong, they will.
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One of the all-time classics! I think all devs should read this.
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It's solid but I've always preferred the similar list about date and time - some of the answers to this list are just "Yea, but what do you want us to call you."
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And the others it spawned : https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood
13 comments