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Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010) by raverbashing on Sunday March 07, 2021 @07:42AM (#26375433)
18 is easy.

It might be related to collation. Are ü and u sorted together? ß? Æ? Is Å its own letter?

Is it John Smith or Smith, John? Is there a Canonical Ordering?

Chinese seems to go by $FamilyName $GivenName as the "canonical order". French people do use the regular order but in some occasions do write it as FAMILYNAME GivenName

Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010) by anoncake on Sunday March 07, 2021 @08:52AM (#26375818)
> French people do use the regular order but in some occasions do write it as FAMILYNAME GivenName

The EU also likes to do this, perhaps so HUNGARIAN Dude isn't called "Mr. Dude".

Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010) by ben_w on Sunday March 07, 2021 @07:51AM (#26375478)
My confusion there is not that an ordering needs to be chosen, but why, if you make a choice, that choice wouldn’t be capable of consistency.

Which is what I think the original list is claiming.

Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010) by raverbashing on Sunday March 07, 2021 @08:38AM (#26375729)
I'd say it's because the order varies between cultures and you might have them mixed up on your system

Not only ordering but equality. So for example Müller and Mueller might be considered equal in German.

Edit: Just found an interesting example, Linkedin orders Á after Z (where the correct in most places would be to sort it together with A), after that, letters in different alphabets (correct) then the emoticons (well, people do add that to their names...)

Re:Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names (2010) by anoncake on Sunday March 07, 2021 @08:47AM (#26375791)
"Müller" and "Mueller" are actually different names. But if umlauts aren't available, "Müller" should still be represented as "Mueller", "Muller" would be just wrong.

Ordering also depends on the context. Usually "ä" is sorted like "a", but in lists of names it's sorted like "ae".