Comments Elsewhere

It’s a sad irony that programmers, predominantly young people who fancy themselves socially tolerant, have built an internet that puts people into discrete categories rather than properly recognizing diversity.

We’ve made forms that “validate” out valid last names like Ng; people without last names simply being screwed. We make address forms that toss out valid addresses. We demand to know your gender but often don’t even give “decline to state” and “other” as answers. We often make games where you must choose between a small set of avatars, all of which look nothing like you if you’re not one of the small handful of ethnic groups the designers had in mind.

There may be a societal tendency to put people into rigid categories behind this but there are also simply technical considerations too. A rigid SQL table makes for easy queries. It takes more processing power to run a regex on the values or even simple wildcard matching (it’s trivial for each record but it can really grow quickly).

We live in a text-box world, not a radio button world. Here’s hoping that faster computers and better design can right a wrong and let our computers reflect that.