Your language sucks • Hacker News Board

Re: Your language sucks

#131

Post by oftenwrong » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 3:49 PM UTC

lucb1e wrote: post #79

dsirijus wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sold. Now we just need to get 7.2 billion minus 2 people on-board.

I think pretty much everyone here would agree. It's common convention that we need to change. I'm Dutch and trying to push for YYYY-MM-DD because it's the only format that makes sense when sorting. Classmates have a lot of trouble with it and still put "Notes 18-10.docx" in a directory full of "Notes 2014-10-18.odt"-like files. Though I would be pretty fine with DD-MM-YYYY, at least be consistent... The only format t…

DD-MM-YYYY -> "19th of October"

MM/DD/YYYY -> "October 19th"

Americans typically would say the latter, so it is consistent in that sense.

Re: Your language sucks

#132

Post by alkonaut » Sun, Oct 19, 2014, 6:19 PM UTC

oftenwrong wrote: post #131

lucb1e wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think pretty much everyone here would agree. It's common convention that we need to change. I'm Dutch and trying to push for YYYY-MM-DD because it's the only format that makes sense when sorting. Classmates have a lot of trouble with it and still put "Notes 18-10.docx" in a directory full of "Notes 2014-10-18.odt"-like files. Though I would be pretty fine with DD-MM-YYYY, at least be consistent... The only format t…

DD-MM-YYYY -> "19th of October" MM/DD/YYYY -> "October 19th" Americans typically would say the latter, so it is consistent in that sense.

So the format comes from how it is read? That sounds plausible. "October 19th, 2014". I'd pronounce a date like "day, month, year" but always format it yyyy-mm-dd, it never struck me that a date format (abbreviation) should be possible to pronounce without first parsing it completely. It does make sense, I just never thought about it.

A reasonable (i.e. sortable) date format is 2014/10/19 but that would make sense in spoken form only as "2014, October 19th" which doesn't sound quite right.

A sidenote: in northern europe (Germany, Sweden etc.) we do it wrong on addresses: [Street, Number, PostalCode, City/Region, Country]. Going from smallest to largest context is actually done correctly in english [Number, Street, PostalCode, City/Region, Country]. You can sort addresses lexically!

Re: Your language sucks

#133

Post by wcummings » Sat, Oct 25, 2014, 2:30 AM UTC

Sirenos wrote: post #117

collyw wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Computing was born in English speaking places (as far as I am aware), probably why it doesn't cater well for more complex languages.

Maybe it's just my ignorance showing, but it seems to me that the complexity is inherent in the languages themselves.

It's not your ignorance, they're obviously enormously more complicated, in many cases