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ISO week date

en.wikipedia.org

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Re: ISO week date

#31

Post by rightbyte »

oefrha wrote: post #23
mikl wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends a lot on your locale. Physical calendars around here always have them, and all decent calendar software has an option to display them. And if you’d grown up with it, it would be a lot more natural. Much like you probably know what month you’re in without checking your watch, I have a pretty good idea what week we’re in, and if someone says they can deliver something in week 8, I instinctively know that’s late…

> And if you’d grown up with it, it would be a lot more natural. That’s like saying imperial units are more natural than ISO units because you grew up with them. Of course what you grew up with is more natural to you, it doesn’t say much. The problem is not everyone grew up with it, compared to “the week of Dec 21.” Not saying week numbers aren’t useful, I’ve used them to label weekly results in datasets, for instanc…

You could argue that the "natural" part with using weeks is that the weekends split up your working days, but there is no effect of januari becoming februari and that weeks thus are a more natural unit for planning at work.

Re: ISO week date

#33

Post by mongol »

scbrg wrote: post #27
Biganon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why Thursday?

Presumably because then you know that the majority of week 1 is in the new year.

Yes exactly. Week 1 is the first week where the majority of the days in the week are in the new year. If Thursday is in the new year, so is also Friday, Saturday and Sunday and with those four days in the new year, it is always the majority of the week.

Re: ISO week date

#34

Post by mongol »

mstade wrote: post #15
jeltz wrote: post #2

ISO week numbers are used a lot in some industries here in Sweden. For example education, so everyone here has encountered them at some point in their lives.

As a Swede I'd say week numbers are pretty ubiquitous in Sweden, with perhaps the first exposure to using week numbers being primary school. I remember counting down to week 9 (spring break) and, I guess, all the other breaks too. Aside from this though, I could never quite get the hang of week numbers and always just found them more confusing than using dates. When my friends say they're going on their summer holida…

Week 9 is the only week I know "by heart", for this reason. All other weeks I can only relate to by looking in the calendar.

Re: ISO week date

#35

Post by baby »

ahartmetz wrote: post #29
baby wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

how am I supposed to know when week 33 is?

You enable week numbers in your computer's calendar.

interesting, this makes me think of Java that requires an IDE to be usable as a developer.

Re: ISO week date

#36

Post by zeroonetwothree »

podnami wrote: post #26
mikl wrote: post #5

That is a surprising amount of complexity, really makes you glad that ISO ironed out all the details, so when I recently told our development team composed of Swiss, German, Portuguese and Danish people that we would be going live in week 4 (of 2020), everyone understood just fine. I still find it strange that some countries have not adopted week numbers. Sure, you can say something like "the week of December 21st",…

Week numbers are a staple in many countries calendar systems. In Sweden most school children follow a weekly curriculum for instance. We also mark milestones of pregnancies by week numbers as opposed to trimesters.

In the US weeks are also used for pregnancies. Trimester is more of an informal thing since it’s so imprecise.

Re: ISO week date

#37

Post by aex »

bshipp wrote: post #25

It seems like some people don't understand the use case for week numbers, at least for businesses. They allow the ability for time series comparisons for a work week. Using the calendar date is hopeless because the 21st day of a month could fall on any day of the week. I want to compare the Monday of the first work week of the year to the Monday of the first work week of last year. That's most helpful when trying to…

I don't think the following first weeks are comparable by many work metrics:

* 30 December 2019 - 5 January 2020 (2020 W01)

* 4 January 2021 - 10 January 2021 (2021 W01)

Re: ISO week date

#38

Post by _jal »

savolai wrote: post #9
mikl wrote: post #5

That is a surprising amount of complexity, really makes you glad that ISO ironed out all the details, so when I recently told our development team composed of Swiss, German, Portuguese and Danish people that we would be going live in week 4 (of 2020), everyone understood just fine. I still find it strange that some countries have not adopted week numbers. Sure, you can say something like "the week of December 21st",…

I find week numbers very cumbersome to use. Most calendars don't have them by default and most everyday interactions around dates don't involve them. As a result it's a burdensome and unroutined lookup in some arbitrary calendar somewhere just to figure out ballpark distances from current moment. I much prefer date ranges.

It is a communicative convention. If you're the only person following a convention, it isn't.

At least this is an additive one - unlike imperial/metric, it isn't a unit replacement. Even if you like "better" measures, you may want to stick with local ones. Little story -

I noodle around with metalwork, and have some machinery. Because I lived in Europe for a bit, I am comfortable with metric, and metric mental math is so much less error prone that when I was choosing machinery, I went metric. That was a mistake.

Everyone I've had in my shop freaks out. All the little rules of thumb and patterns for remembering relations between, say, feed rate to mill spindle speed for a particular alloy go out the window. Reading documentation and how-to texts written in the US puts you right back at doing lots of math in weird bases in your head. And so on.

It is fine, I'm happy with my setup. But there are reasons not to pick the "better" method. And those reasons perpetuate the existence of the other ones.

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