LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles
If you only do this you are going to fail. This is why Aristotle got physics so badly wrong, right? Reasoning has to be a cyclical process of compressing complex realities into sets of simple principles and only then are you licensed to decompress those principles into making statements about reality.
Addressing common misconceptions is worthwhile, and lists are a good way to do it. You can find similar lists in the academic literature for many different subjects, e.g., here's an article about common misconceptions in thermodynamics. I've also mentioned math books listing counterexamples before. Many counterexamples address common misconceptions.
I like to create Anki cards for common misconceptions, to make sure I don't makes these mistakes myself. One issue with this is whether correcting specific cases causes my brain to recognize a more general case....
So while many of these false beliefs are worth noting, it's worth thinking why programmers make these mistakes in practice. While it might be the case that names can include numbers, it's probably also going to be the case that the majority of numbers get into names via user error. Depending on the purpose of your database, it might be more valuable to avoid user error, than avoid a minority of users being excluded.
The reason I mention this is a lot of things in life are a study in trade offs. Quantum mechanics isn't very good at describing how big things work, and classical mechanics isn't very good at describing how small things work.
Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up).
A lot of programmers believe they can parse HTML with regular expressions.
From Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names:
anything someone tells you is their name is — by definition — an appropriate identifier for them.
There should be a list of false things people coming from common law jurisdictions believe about how choice of identity works on the rest of the globe.
Sometimes a user puts something in a "name" field that they do not actually intend to be used to identify themselves.
They may be trying to get that string displayed to other users in a highlighted fashion. If someone puts "Wal-Mart Sucks" in the name field on a blog comment, it isn't because they seriously want to be identified by the surname of Sucks. They're just saying that Wal-Mart sucks, in a dramatic way.
They may be trying to break the system in one way or another. If someone puts their name as "Robert'; drop table students; --" then depending on the social and technical context they might be giving themselves a clever alias; or they might be trying to attack the database.
I think it's worth noting that, yes, if you want your database of names/addresses/times/etc. to be fully robust, you need to essentially represent these items as unconstrained strings of arbitrary length (including zero).
However, in practice, most likely you're not building a fully robust database. For example, you are not solving the problem of, "how can I fully represent all of the marvelous variety of human names and addresses ?", but rather, "how can I maximize the changes that the packages my company is shipping to customers will actual...
Also, there is a place where the sun rises in the west and sets in the east.
(Gur fha evfrf orpnhfr bs gur Rnegu'f ebgngvba, ohg rira va gur nofrapr bs gur Rnegu'f ebgngvba vg jbhyq evfr naq frg bapr n lrne orpnhfr bs ubj gur Rnegu'f nkvf cbvagf. Vs lbh ner pybfr rabhtu gb gur Abegu Cbyr, gur ebgngvba unf artyvtvoyr pbagevohgvba gb gur fha'f evfvat naq frggvat naq gur fha evfrf naq frgf cerggl zhpu bayl orpnhfr bs gur nkvf. Tb gb gur Abegu Cbyr, frr jurer gur fha evfrf, naq tb njnl sebz gur cbyr n fubeg qvfgnapr va n qverpgvba fhpu gung guvf cbvag vf gb gur jrfg.)
A problem of believing something wrong could also be a problem of classification or problem of language. There is so much lost in translation and as far as a programmer is concerned they deal with a very formal language. So they are not as good at informal languages and nuances.
I'm not a programmer, so my view may be a little bit skewed.. but this seems like a list of things that may or may not be correct (and I'd like to put things in a continuum, or percentages, or some other more practically observable other than a list) but it doesn't really get any further than that. How substantial many of the claims are?
I honestly doubt "programmers" get all these wrong. I'm not going to link to a post (I've seen some people replying with a post as if it's a substitute for actually saying what's wrong) or even say that "prog...
Could you turn the tracking links into direct ones?
That's because the distinction doesn't actually exist. In particular, to the extent gender refers to a real concept and not an pure XML tag, it refers to what is commonly called sex.
This is an interesting claim. Things that are often lumped into 'gender' includes things like dress, pronouns, and bathrooms, and these things are very important to people. Maybe they shouldn't be, but they are.
You are very unclear as to what you are suggesting. One obvious interpretation is that caring if you wear a dress or a tie is the same as hallucinating, and we should stop doing it. This is an interesting claim... and potentially a very useful one. I would support this. I would also support unisex bathrooms and gender neutral pronouns. So we might not disagree at all.
But it is also possible to interpret your claim as saying that non-standard genders are less valid than standard ones, even when the standard ones are arbitrary or harmful. This is harder to defend -- in fact, no one defends this as a general theory except extreme moral relativists (the claim that 'woman are not worthy to vote' is generally not held to be true based on the culture you are in, but to have a higher reasoning behind arguments for and against; in case it is not obvious, voting was assigned as a gender role; a voting woman would be outside of either standard gender for much of our history). Obviously this is an extreme example, but you can see that gender matters; if in your life you find that the only reason that gender matters is whether or not your bathroom has an urinal or not, this is very good for you.
(It is also possible that you believe that we currently have developed the perfect gender roles, and any change would be a worsening of conditions. This is sufficiently different from my own view that I am not willing to spend my time debating it unless you give me some sort of compelling evidence up front.)
I think that this is sufficient for you to see why I claim that you are equivocating on gender and sex. I'm fairly certain that what you actually want to claim is something much less strong, simply that using made-up pronouns and complaining about what bathroom you are assigned is annoying at best, and perhaps a sign of a personality disorder. In this case, you might want a very different list than the one provided.
Others have already mentioned the benefits of commercial sites pandering to their clients, so I needn't elaborate.
But it is also possible to interpret your claim as saying that non-standard genders are less valid than standard ones
Well they are, although "less valid" is a rather strong understatement.
'woman are not worthy to vote'
You do realize that that's a moral claim. In order to evaluate it in a utilitarian framework, one could look at, for example, whether women having the vote leads to better or worse policy outcomes. I think this is certainly a debatable position either way and certainly is far from obvious. Heck it might even depend on oth...
There are some long lists of false beliefs that programmers hold. isn't because programmers are especially likely to be more wrong than anyone else, it's just that programming offers a better opportunity than most people get to find out how incomplete their model of the world is.
I'm posting about this here, not just because this information has a decent chance of being both entertaining and useful, but because LWers try to figure things out from relatively simple principles-- who knows what simplifying assumptions might be tripping us up?
The classic (and I think the first) was about names. There have been a few more lists created since then.
Time. And time zones. Crowd-sourced time errors.
Addresses. Possibly more about addresses. I haven't compared the lists.
Gender. This is so short I assume it's seriously incomplete.
Networks. Weirdly, there is no list of falsehoods programmers believe about html (or at least a fast search didn't turn anything up). Don't trust the words in the url.
Distributed computing Build systems.
Poem about character conversion.
I got started on the subject because of this about testing your code, which was posted by Andrew Ducker.