Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order of Japanese names

Re:Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order o... by SilasX on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @06:57PM (#19975986)

You know I have to do it...

Falsehoods programmers believe about names:

- Everyone has exactly one well-defined "family name". (In Latin America people have more than one, and some cultrues may go by a single name that isn't a family indicator.)

- In every formal context, the "family name" is how you should address someone. (You do not address the queen of England as "Mrs. Windsor", and Saddam Hussein preferred to be known as "Saddam", which is not a family name.)

(With that said, if it's understood that those assumptions hold, this is a great convention and I endorse it ... at least for the first mention in an article.)

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Re:Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order o... by throwaway287391 on Tuesday May 21, 2019 @11:53PM (#19977603)

> In every formal context, the "family name" is how you should address someone. (You do not address the queen of England as "Mrs. Windsor", and Saddam Hussein preferred to be known as "Saddam", which is not a family name.)

Don't these "falsehoods" just become ridiculous at some point? Like, am I really supposed to carve out special cases in my shitty app's business logic for the Queen and Saddam Hussein?

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Re:Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order o... by Sniffnoy on Wednesday May 22, 2019 @12:09AM (#19977694)

A better counterexample here would be Russian conventions of address. I'm not sure why the grandparent comment used such rare, basically-ignorable cases instead.

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Re:Foreign Minister Taro Kono to ask media to switch order o... by hoseja on Wednesday May 22, 2019 @04:34AM (#19979121)

Shouldn't you instead make your app without these assumptions so that you don't have to?

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