Obligatory XKCD)

@manassehkatz-Moving2Codidact see also Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

Who doesn't have a last name? Is there some culture in the world that only uses first names?

@terdon Yes, there are loads of people with only one name (whether you call that word the first or the last name is probably up to you. Or is that in particular your point?)

@terdon I work with a woman from India, which has only the first name. No idea what she did to buy a plain ticket.

@terdon: wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_legally_mononymous_people lists 25 people, currently living, whose legal name is a mononym. And remember, Wikipedia requires notability, so there's probably plenty of people with mononyms that aren't notable enough to be listed on Wikipedia. For example, Turkey only established surnames after WW1, so there might still be some (very old) people alive that don't have one. Parts of India and several Native American and First Nations tribes use only one name. Mononyms are not part of US tradition, but it is legal to change your name to one. And so on …

Fair enough, thanks @JörgWMittag. I was thinking of silly examples like royalty and I see no reason why the rest of us should humor that kind of nonsense, but that page lists some better examples.

@terdon Are you aware of the common misconceptions people/ programmers tend to have about peoples names? For example here: kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/… Please don't assume everyone has a name that has the formal structure as your name has.

@quarague please don't assume I am an ignorant hick. My parents come from two different cultures, each with a different alphabet and naming conventions, and I have lived in 4 different countries, each again with its own conventions. I am very well aware that there is a huge variety in conventions world wide, but I hadn't come across any cultures that regularly used just a single name which is why I asked.

@JörgWMittag Thais didn't have family names until the 1950s, I think. It suddenly became a popular issue to have one, so they started making them up and putting them on government documents. Naturally, they quickly came to believe that longer names were more important, and so the names got longer. And longer. And longer. The government eventually had to step in and say that no government document will allow a name greater than X number of characters. If you know any Thais, you might have noticed they have a ridiculously long last name.

@AC A weird idea that restrictions on the name field is anything other than a cost benefit analysis and unwillingness to account for non-ascii and even non-english characters. English is the language of the world and the internet. The large majority of people have adapted to that, and the rest easily can. It's not worth the company's and programmers time to account for the odd ones.

@user27701: The fundamental purpose of identifiers is generally to be able to easily answer a yes/no/maybe question "Do these identifiers identify the same person" with "no" in the extremely vast majority of cases involving different people, with essentially no false negatives other than in cases involving identifiers for someone before and after a name change. Making the name nicely human readable is a secondary consideration.

@supercat Name and email is always going to make a unique contact record, assuming you are smart enough to disallow duplicate contacts by email. User and password, also, as the "web-login version". For the handful of people without an email, it's just frankly not worth considering for virtually all applications. When they slap a name on a passport, that "identifies" you in a very archaic way that the Internet does not attempt to emulate. Hence, such documents always have a unique number.

@quarague Your sneering tone "please don't assume people are like you" and signaling your virtue is way out of line. You can keep your politics, but keep them to yourself. I flagged your comment, but there's a moderation problem on this site on this exact thing.

@user27701 Name and email is not a scheme that will uniquely identify someone. Consider John Smith, and his toddler son also called John, both registered with the father's email address. Or Ashley Jones and her husband Ashley, both sharing the email [email protected]

@PlayerOne If they share an email, then they share all online accounts, but sysadmin don't design it that way. One account, one person. If they have one email, they can presumably get another easily. Your scenario is not a real issue.