Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names

It goes even further.

I know Mies van der Rohe (architect) from a street name, from an address change that once was important to me. I googled his name a long time ago, and that's almost all I remembered.

The name "Mies van der Rohe" follows a common pattern for people with a history from the Netherlands, "$firstname van (der|den) $lastname". So, I almost automatically splitted his name into "Mies" and "van der Rohe". Guess how suprised I was when I heared "Ludwig Mies van der Rohe" recently. OK, so LMvdR surely had two first names, that's quite common here. "Ludwig" and "Mies" must be the first names, and "van der Rohe" the last name. WRONG! "Mies van der Rohe" was his last name.

Just to annoy anyone handling names in computers, he was commonly refered to as "Mies" (which translates to english as lousy, crappy, bad). And to really annoy anyone handling names in computers, he was born as Maria Ludwig Michael Mies. A female first firstname, and no "van der Rohe" at all.

Some more examples: Re^7: regex to return line with name but not if it has a number - and I guess the name of the second example in that post has drastically changed this year.

Alexander