Things we think are true but are not

The other day my son and I were talking about common mistakes people make when handling different “common” data-types in application design. Two of the more interesting examples we discussed were time and names.

Here are a few great posts discussing these data-types:

• Falsehoods programmers believe about names,
• Personal names around the world,
• Falsehoods programmers believe about time.

Then there is the question of sexes, ISO 5218 defines Not known, Male, Female, and Not applicable. Facebook on the other hand has a total of 58 options for gender.

Ryan