251–260 of 437 posts
I teach my 9-yo daughter to write dates in ISO 8601 format whenever permissible, too. I tell her that all other formats that her school teaches her are just nonsense and wrong.
Raise her on hexadecimal too. She will thrive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes. The 27th, or the 27th of February. To us, US English seems to skip a lot of the small joining words of various flavours.
Well you're actually saying "the 27th day of the month of February" and removing some of the small joining words of various flavors. :) /s
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
> Date().toLocaleDateString() > Uncaught TypeError: Date().toLocaleDateString is not a function That doesn't seem like a standard API call.
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…
Works fine for the Chinese and Japanese, and last I checked they were humans.
American English already has this weirdness elsewhere - the $-sign in $15 is read in the "wrong" place and always trips me up when I'm reading something out loud but others will defend that practice to the death
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.
What practical difference does it make to you? The week starts whenever you decide it starts. Would it annoy you even more if I decided to start my week on Thursday?
The practical difference is that inconsistent calendar representations make them a pain to use.
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…
Take for example "October the third, two thousand nine" (10/3/2009, MDY). In German one would pronounce this as "der dritte Oktober zweitausendneun" (3.10.2009, DMY). In Hungarian "kétezer-kilenc október harmadika" (2009. 10. 03., YMD). All of these pronunciations reflect the order numerical dates are written: using any other convention would simply make them less natural to pronounce.
Now it is certainly not unheard of that the order of pronunciation also changes (see the British "the third of October"), but changing language is a lot harder in some cases impossible without breaking grammar than changing written numerical representations.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes! I constantly get complaints when using ISO 8601 on school documents. But I won't stop using it.
I guess the complaints are because the format is unfamiliar and strikes non-software people as being non-standard. Perhaps use a format like 3/Nov/2021 ?
People were unfamiliar with showering and brushing their teeth. We move forward.
I have a question for the timezone crowd: why does the ISO 8601 format include a UTC offset like "+09:00" instead of a more useful region name like "Asia/Tokyo"[0]? Take for example the timestamp "2025-07-20 13:30:00+09:00": - If it was supposed to represent a meeting in Asia/Tokyo and that region changes offsets (DST or political reasons), we don't have enough information to update the timestamp because it could als…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My wife recently bought by mistake a keyboard whose layout I couldn't figure out. It took me a full 5 minutes to even get to the correct place where I could configure keyboard layouts under Windows 10 settings. Then I had to choose the keyboard layout I wanted to add. This was a list in a dropdown with hundreds of options without an image of what each layout looks like so I could not check which option matched the ke…
I like the method that Mac OS uses to detect the layout of a newly connected keyboard. It brings up a dialog asking the user to press specific keys (something like "type the | character") until there is only one possible layout that would generate the observed keycodes for the characters in question.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's the most obnoxiously American attitude imaginable to ignore this issue because it doesn't affect them... As an American I can fully confirm that 3/11/2011 is obnoxiously ambiguous. It affects us. But most Americans (particularly outside of science / engineering fields) are too thick-headed to recognize the problem or think about ways to improve it. So I do what I can. I don't even ask what time format somethin…
Point them at the fiasco where NASA mixed up Imperia and Metric. And also ask but why are we not targeting international customers.
The latter was an ice rink whose customers are very physically local. Local teams do compete internationally but the ice rink itself isn't an international org.