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ISO 8601: a better date format

kirby.kevinson.org

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Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#111

Post by bhaak »

systemvoltage wrote: post #90
bhaak wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I hate writing ISO 8601 dates, even though I know it is logical. Nobody forces you to write ISO 8601 dates but if you want your dates to be easily parseable by humans, why would you write them all in numbers? 3 Nov 2020, 3rd November 2020, Nov 3rd 2020, even something like 2020 Nov 3 is uniquely parseable by humans. Even if the human doesn't know the language of the month, they can still find out what date it is fr…

Not sure, I grew up in two countries, one metric and one english units. I still prefer inches and feet to describe length. I would like decimeter but no one uses it.

This came up in a r/AskEurope thread and at least some slavic countries use decimeters.

But that's the beauty about easily convertable units. Even if other people use other conventions, the mental process to convert them is almost zero.

Just imagine somebody giving their height just in inches instead of the usual feet and inches?

Could you mentally parse what 76 inches are?

I guess you have basically no problem with 193cm, 1.93m , or "one ninety-three", or even 19.3dm.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#112

Post by guerrilla »

systemvoltage wrote: post #28

No one here is talking about practicality for non-software engineers which is probably 99.9% of the population. It might be fine for sorting and no one gives a shit about endianess. Common person would argue - why do they need to know the year first? Most people encounter dates in the same year, they already know we're in 2021 and it is not as important. Having to laboriously parse YYYY before getting to the most imp…

Europe and China disagree with you.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#113

Post by lazyasciiart »

lovelyviking wrote: post #84

I invented for myself this one: 2021-02-26_08-30-00_ And never looked back. Because since then I have no problems with dates anymore. If there is a need for 'ms' you can add them in the end or add more sections for more precision. For me it solves it.

One day you'll need to read a date written by someone else.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#114

Post by anjbe »

systemvoltage wrote: post #51
wahern wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30 years ago when most literature was either published recently (newspapers, magazines, etc), or the date of publication was mostly irrelevant (books), your argument makes sense. If you cared at all, what mattered was usually the month and day. For most of the literature people read in the 21st century, especially this past decade, the year is the most important part. People normally couldn't care less whether someth…

I think I need to labor on my point a bit more. There are many use cases for dates. From publication date to planning vacation on a calendar. What is the most common use for a date? Calendar, I guess? The most frequently used dates we encounter are within +/- weeks from now. In a day to day use, YYYY is useless.

By far the most common use I have for dates is filling out forms. In those cases the year is almost always essential.

Speaking from personal experience, even an American can make an effort to use YYYY-MM-DD in any situation asking for a numeric date, and almost always succeed. The biggest exceptions are forms asking for MM/DD, and online payment forms asking for credit card expiration as MM/YY.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#115

Post by em-bee »

yokaze wrote: post #48
m_eiman wrote: post #29

While on the subject of time, could you Americans pretty please stop believing that the week starts on Sunday? It's just as wrong as your date format.

China and Japan have Sunday as the first day since the 4th and 8th century respectively: http://chartsbin.com/view/41671 . So presumably, you come from a Europe-centric view: http://chartsbin.com/view/41671

historically europe also started the week on sunday as per christian tradition. i too grew up with the idea that the week starts on sunday.

this change to starting the week on monday is therefore a recent development.

same in china btw. days in china are numbered. monday is number 1, and sunday is 7. so while people may have the idea that the week starts on sunday (i don't know) the day numbering suggests that it actually starts on monday.

same goes for europe. monday by law and sunday by tradition

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#116

Post by TeMPOraL »

jiggawatts wrote: post #6

The real advantage is that Azure and AWS and every other US-centric cloud service insists on showing me that something happened on the 3/11/2021. It's a wild guess to figure out if that is the 11th of March or the 3rd of November. Unless there's also another date with a number higher than 12 in it, there is no way to tell. None. None whatsoever. For US staff with US regional settings, it's always obvious which date i…

Yup. I hate // AM/PM formats with a passion. Doesn't help that I work with UK teams now, and their "natural" date format is 3/11/2021, with meaning of 3 and 11 reversed to what they'd mean for Americans...

sigh.

ISO 8601 everything. I'm religious about it. I write it in messages, on government forms, anything that doesn't force me to use a different format. On a bit of my insistence, we use ISO 8601 notation for all dates at home. I think the benefit is quite obvious once one starts using it.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#117

Post by lurquer »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #72
jacobolus wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have taken to writing 11 March 2021 or similar whenever possible. But sure, 2021-03-11 is also fine, when trying to save something machine readable. The US conventions are indeed horrendous.

Another great thing about 2021-03-11 is that, even putting aside its technical advantages, it is (probably) intuitively understandable to any literate person even if they have never seen it before and, most importantly, it is almost immune from confusion because (hopefully) nobody is insane enough to expect YYYY-DD-MM. YYYY-MM-DD both satisfies the American intuitive expectation of month coming before day, and the Wo…

> it is almost immune from confusion because (hopefully) nobody is insane enough to expect YYYY-DD-MM. YYYY-MM-DD both satisfies the American intuitive expectation of month coming before day,

I disagree. (Or, perhaps I’m insane...) I paused when coming across the ANSI version in the article as I couldn’t tell whether it was YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-DD-MM. I thought there was a typo or something.

I’ve nothing against the standard, but as Americans have no ‘intuitive’ reason to sort the fields by significance, it is natural for some to incorrectly assume the ANSI version is just the American version written backwards.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#118

Post by saithound »

systemvoltage wrote: post #28

No one here is talking about practicality for non-software engineers which is probably 99.9% of the population. It might be fine for sorting and no one gives a shit about endianess. Common person would argue - why do they need to know the year first? Most people encounter dates in the same year, they already know we're in 2021 and it is not as important. Having to laboriously parse YYYY before getting to the most imp…

These "arguments by practicality " are almost always just-so stories.

The Hungarians (and presumably the Chinese) have their own just-so stories about why YMD is the most practical order: you use dates mostly when you sort heating bills, invoices, or even fruit preserves, and in all those cases you need to sort by year first.

Australians will tell you a tale about how "day before month" is human-scale, while "month before day" is not. Heck, ask a German why the decimal comma is superior to the decimal point, and you'll hear plenty of practical-sounding reasons. French carpenters will tell you how they use decimal units because those are much more practical than inches. British people will explain how left-hand traffic is the only practical choice (6a41ef).

People are much better at confabulating reasons for sticking with conventions than they are at telling practical and impractical conventions apart. Indeed, if there was one obviously practical choice, there would be no differing conventions for ISO standards to reconcile.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#119

Post by jacobolus »

misterS wrote: post #108
jacobolus wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mac Firefox and Mac Chrome both break a bunch of keyboard shortcuts if you use a non-US-ANSI keyboard. Safari handles alternate layouts correctly. Just yesterday I learned that on an ISO Spanish keyboard, both of those browsers will pop up a help menu for ⌘⇧7. The logic goes: ⇧7 means / on a Spanish ISO keyboard, and ⇧/ means ? on a US-ANSI keyboard, therefore ⌘⇧7 is by the transitive property of inter-layout shift f…

Stuff like this is the reason why I, as a non-american software engineer, use `US_en` layouts on all my machines.

I use a Japanese keyboard that pretends to be a US-ANSI on my laptop. The extra keys and narrow spacebar are super handy.

Something like http://www.keyboard-layout-editor.com/#/gists/9150730dbd4d28...

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#120

Post by knorker »

jiggawatts wrote: post #6

The real advantage is that Azure and AWS and every other US-centric cloud service insists on showing me that something happened on the 3/11/2021. It's a wild guess to figure out if that is the 11th of March or the 3rd of November. Unless there's also another date with a number higher than 12 in it, there is no way to tell. None. None whatsoever. For US staff with US regional settings, it's always obvious which date i…

Sure you can tell. You just hire an investigator to find out who wrote the memo, and find where in the world they grew up, in what culture.

If the answer comes back very US, then it's middle endian US format. Else it's DMY.

Note that the article is wrong to just say "dd.mm.yy" is used in "Europe". Some countries use yyyy-mm-dd and others dd/mm/yy.

The US format is the only one that's retarded, though.

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