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ISO 8601: a better date format

kirby.kevinson.org

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Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#121

Post by jpetso »

gherkinnn wrote: post #81
globular-toast wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any choice is arbitrary. What is a week to the solar system? The only things that are real are days and years.

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 and the Christians get their favorite day off and yay, we have a two-day weekend.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#122

Post by 3np »

eqvinox wrote: post #109
otherme123 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also always write 11 मार्च 2021 or similar whenever possible. No problems so far.

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 character and as long as it's < 7d ago it's unambiguous what time and day a command exited in case I forget.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#123

Post by lou1306 »

jacobolus wrote: post #49
vbezhenar wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took many decades to widely adopt UTF-8. I think that one of the reasons was that US companies did not really care about character encodings, as it's not something they have to often deal with. Even today managing multiple keyboard layouts is a pain in most operating systems, it's buggy, it does not have enough configuration options, it's not convenient. Probably because most US developers never tried to use that…

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…

Not only Firefox. Cmd-/ is also a very common "toggle line comment" shortcut. I think it's the default on Sublime and IntelliJ, and any editor that offers a "Sublime compatible" preset (like VS code) imitate that. Of course, such a shortcut broken out-of-the-box for any keyboard layout that lacks a / key.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#124

Post by knorker »

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…

Meters are "human scale". To say not is nonsense.

And 3/2. Is that the future or the past? No way to know. Did you miss the meeting, or is it next week?

"No one uses a decimeter"... What bubble do you live in? But please, lecture some more about cultures you don't understand.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#125

Post by gurkendoktor »

luplex wrote: post #58
CyberRabbi wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 employ the many, many native speakers who emigrate from the PRC.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#126

Post by jacobolus »

lou1306 wrote: post #123
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…

Not only Firefox. Cmd-/ is also a very common "toggle line comment" shortcut. I think it's the default on Sublime and IntelliJ, and any editor that offers a "Sublime compatible" preset (like VS code) imitate that. Of course, such a shortcut broken out-of-the-box for any keyboard layout that lacks a / key.

Yeah, Sublime copied this shortcut (like most of its features) from TextMate, and it has since spread widely.

Amusingly, TextMate's author and many early users were European programmers with US-ANSI keyboards (because the various European layouts are just too painful for writing code in ASCII-based programming languages).

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#127

Post by jbj »

my birthday is at the end of the month, during a processing of a document for my US visa 10+ years ago, I was dealing with 2 different sites, one accomodating my local date formatting, and one fixed for the US standard. I was puzzled that I had been made 2 years younger when verifying my data, turned out my birth date of month was now month number 24+ of the year, pushing my birth ahead, and my birtb month had become my birth date of month.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#128

Post by richrichardsson »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #64
monsieurbanana wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sigh... I never remember the names of the logical fallacies, I have to look up them, thanks a lot. Anyways, here's yours: Slippery Slope.

Where’s the logical fallacy? More people natively speak Chinese than any other language in the world. If you want to maximize the exposure of your ideas, it’s only logical to render them in Chinese. It’s the same reason I prefer to distribute applications over the web. FYI: English has ~1100 million total speakers but only 318 millon native speakers, while Chinese has 918 million native speakers. https://www.visualca…

> More people natively speak Chinese than any other language in the world

You've made the assumption that all Chinese people speak one language, which is a false assumption I'm afraid [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_China

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#129

Post by _raz »

I like how the first paragraph ends with

"I’m here to (hopefully) change your mind by introducing you to a lesser-known date format called ISO 8601."

It seems so foreign to me, and most people i know, to use anything but ISO8601 or RFC3339. Might be, as with most things, that we here up in the Nordics simply are used to it.

Re: ISO 8601: a better date format

#130

Post by fauigerzigerk »

vbezhenar wrote: post #13
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…

It took many decades to widely adopt UTF-8. I think that one of the reasons was that US companies did not really care about character encodings, as it's not something they have to often deal with. Even today managing multiple keyboard layouts is a pain in most operating systems, it's buggy, it does not have enough configuration options, it's not convenient. Probably because most US developers never tried to use that…

But contrary to the date issue, you could at least make a case for using ASCII everywhere. I'm not saying it has no downsides (e.g information density). It may also be unrealistic and culturally insensitive, but there are very clear upsides as well. Not so with the U.S date format. It's just bad.
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