I recently came across a really nice set – not directly related – of articles dealing with various profound errors that programmers and system designers fall into when dealing with names and addresses.
The TL;DR if you don’t read these: names and addresses are hard and most things you believe about them are wrong.
Let’s start with Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. Without even trying the author lists 40 things we believe about names that are just plain wrong.
In a similar vein, Falsehoods programmers believe about addresses, which particularly speaks to me. One of the fundamental errors about addresses is to think they identify a location. This is incorrect. An address might identify a location, but it is fundamentally a description which instructs a postman how to deliver a letter or parcel. Substitute pizza operative, Amazon driver or writ server as desired.
Even without getting into the weirdness around the actual shape of the planet, Falsehoods programmers believe about geography touches on place names.
And as a bonus: Falsehoods programmers believe about time – computers prove to be pretty bad clocks, and working out a calendar is very complicated.
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