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ISO 8601: a better date format

kirby.kevinson.org

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Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#131

Post by bhaak »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #43
est wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some proposal that this year 2021 is actually 12021, to make the year neutral of some specific religious event.

I know you’re not saying you are encouraging it and it’s just a related but of trivia, but I find that hilarious. Because when someone asks “why start there?” the answer “it’s a thousand years before Jesus Christ was born, the millennium heralding his arrival” is better? (I’m not even Christian but I also don’t have a chip on my shoulder and can accept its influence on the world)

It's ten thousand years before the assumed (but likely wrong) birthday of Jesus Christ, to have a positive date for all written human history (well, until we find the archives of Atlantis) and an easy round offset for the prevalent human calender in use.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#132

Post by andy_ppp »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #116
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…

Format the date on the frontend using date.toLocaleDateString() and let the browsers locale do the work for you (assuming you’re in JS and on the web).

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#133

Post by eqvinox »

3np wrote: post #122
eqvinox wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I go with 「２０２１年０３月１１日」. Free bonus test included for whether software handles alternate numerals ;)

Tangent, but I do like the space-efficiency in some cases for Chinese/Japanese characters that make them great for status bars and terminal prompts. E.g. a single character to unambiguously denote weekday, window layout (全／広／高）, and others. Renders everywhere as long as you have a decent CJK font. Bonus: looks a lot less stupid than emojis. My desktop terminal prompt right now shows [金 19:58:22] - just a single chara…

Absolutely agree. Also in some cases you get "tables" aligned for free (... if there's nothing else length-varying.)

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#134

Post by gherkinnn »

jpetso wrote: post #121
gherkinnn wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a day in the solar system? What is anything anywhere anyway? That’s not the point. The point is that in the US people typically work Mon-Fri and loaf around Sat-Sun (weekend) and yet the week starts in Sundays. It’s infuriating.

Well, the Bible says that you shall rest on the seventh day of the week, which in certain religions is known as Sabbath or Shabbat or whatever, which as we all know maps to Saturday. Without having really done the research, I've been ascribing the US calendar idiosyncrasy to religious influences... and really, that's what Europe does as well, they just picked a different mapping. So now when we rest, both the Jews an…

If your weekend is Fri-Sat then by all means start your week on Sunday.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#135

Post by young_unixer »

globular-toast wrote: post #34

The US format is indeed awful but so is the European one really. ISO-8601 is the only one that makes sense, although the concept of months isn't really useful at all. But it's not always unambiguous. ISO-8601 supports local time. It's only an unambiguous timestamp of the time zone is included.

> although the concept of months isn't really useful at all.

Made me chuckle, but I agree.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#136

Post by antihero »

It is a good format for sorting, but misses the point of use. As humans, we want to read the most significant data to our use case first.

The author confuses value to the reader with magnitute. In normal numbers, they happen to be the same thing.

In most cases, we want to discern between days first, them months, then years. If you look at a list of dates:

2021-01-01

2021-01-02

2021-01-03

2021-01-04

You're just going to be seeing a heap of noise before you see the actual number you care about.

If you consider that days are the most valuable, then months, then years, you get the UK/European format.

01/01/2021

02/01/2021

03/01/2021

04/01/2021

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#137

Post by TeMPOraL »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #21
hannob wrote: post #9

There's another aspect you may not know about: It's close to how it's done in chinese, which is 2021年3月17日. They use different separators (the chinese words for year, month and day), but it's close enough. Given that china is the country with the largest population it may not be a bad idea to use something a large number of people will easily understand.

Maybe we should also start speaking Chinese since it may not be a bad idea to use something a large number of people will easily understand. Edit: this is not sarcasm. It’s simple logic, unless there is something wrong with learning other languages.

I think we should. At the very least, our children should.

That's why I'm planning on having my daughter learn Mandarin along with English - to prepare her for the shape of the economy she'll be living in.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#138

Post by em-bee »

gurkendoktor wrote: post #125
luplex wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is actually not wrong. China is already very important, and its influence is going to grow. Speaking and understanding Chinese well is a competitive advantage.

I've learned Chinese for fun. It's great that I can now read a few more Go/C++ READMEs on GitHub, but other than that, I can't imagine what advantage it has? Maybe there'd be one if I came from a poorer manufacturing country? even China commentators in Western media are often completely clueless about the language. If these jobs don't require Chinese fluency, then which ones do? And even then, it'd be much easier to…

as more people learn chinese, the available labor pool grows and these jobs may well require chinese skills in the future

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#139

Post by grey_earthling »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #43
est wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's some proposal that this year 2021 is actually 12021, to make the year neutral of some specific religious event.

I know you’re not saying you are encouraging it and it’s just a related but of trivia, but I find that hilarious. Because when someone asks “why start there?” the answer “it’s a thousand years before Jesus Christ was born, the millennium heralding his arrival” is better? (I’m not even Christian but I also don’t have a chip on my shoulder and can accept its influence on the world)

The answer is “because -10000 CE is an approximation of the beginning of human civilisation, using this epoch removes negative year numbers from all historical dates, and it's simple to convert from the ubiquitous CE epoch”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#140

Post by systemvoltage »

saithound wrote: post #118
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 b…

This way we can never reach consensus and beat about the bush! Welcome to the bike shed. What color should we paint it with?
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