this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2023
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Tbh I don't really get why people get upset about mm/dd/yyyy vs dd/mm/yyyy. Is it a little weird? Sure, but personally, saying "July 4th, 1776" feels as natural as "the 4th of July, 1776". The former is more formal, the latter is more casual.
People don't get upset about saying the date in whatever format. They get upset when you write it in that format without specifying, so that you don't know if 07/04/1776 is July 4th or April 7th.
I love it when someone sends me a message like this:
????
What's especially bad is things that are meant for an international audience. Like the 2023 Miami Formula 1 race was held the weekend of the 5th to the 7th of May. But, say you didn't know that and you see that the date is specified as: 05/07/2023. Is that a race in May or July? It's Formula 1 so the audience is probably mostly European so the European order makes sense. But, it's a race in the USA so the US order makes sense.
It really sucks when to decode a date and time you have to first figure out who the target audience for the information is, then use that to help decode the information.
You'll just have to compromise.
One word: Ambiguity. We need to either have a standard and stick to it, or a small handful of standards that cannot be confused for each other. DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY can be confused for each other, so the nonsensical MM/DD/YYYY should move over and make room for DD/MM/YYYY, or we should drop both and just use YYYY-MM-DD.
ISO 8601 for life.
Or DD-MMM-YYYY. Like 05/OCT/2005, which is my favorite if I don't need it to be entirely numerical.
That's fine because it's unambiguous. If I'm using another standard and you're using that, I can correct it without having to think about it.
It's not about saying it. It has to do with ordering it by size of time unit. Like I don't write the time as 43:12:19 to denote 43 minutes and 19 seconds past midday do I.
If it’s about size of time unit surely it should be 2023/11/20?
ISO8601 is the best format and the international standard to denote date and time.
2023-11-21T00:34:2
I'm not sure I would agree with that. ISO-8601 is ambiguous, and very difficult to parse. For example, here are a couple valid ISO-8601 strings. Could you let me know what they mean?
Taken from here. My favorite is the last one (
20). If someone just wrote20and told you to parse it using ISO-8601, what would you get? Hour? It could even be century (ie.2023%100)!!So I would argue that ISO-8601 is just a wee bit too flexible. Personally, I like RFC 3339 just a bit more...
Edit: that said, I would definitely agree that something along the lines of
2021-07-27T14:20:32Zis better than any regularly accepted alternative, and I pretty much format my dates that way all the time.to be fair, you don't parse "20" without first passing "%C"
Don’t think my bank will like it if I date forms with that.
Mine doesn't care. It actually never occurred to me not to.
How do you decide what the second will be, when you start writing it or when you finish?
Nope.
Yes, and it is used only with dashes instead of slashes. This is also how date is written when you want alphabetical sorting to work on the date, too
Not necessarily. Size of time unit doesn't explicitly mean largest to smallest. For human comprehension day first makes sense because that's the most significant piece of data usually. Likewise for time of day the hour is the most significant piece of data.
Though for computer comprehension, absolutely yyyy/mm/dd is best hands down.
The best date format is ISO 8601 anyways.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
I don't understand why it matters how you say the date vs. how it's written with slashes.
If someone asks you the time, and you look at your watch and it says 11:45, you could just answer "eleven forty five", but depending on the context you might just say "It's noon" or "It's almost noon" or "It's a quarter to noon". 11:45 is how you get the information into your brain. How you process that information and how you pass it on depends on the context.
The best date format is clearly ISO-8601, YYYY-MM-DD. In that format, US independence day is 1776-07-04. But, you don't need to say it as "seventeen seventy six, seventh month, fourth day". You can say "July 4th, 1776" or "The 4th of July, 1776".
ISO 8601. 1776-07-04. Everyone else is a heathen.
I don't really care which way it goes, it just gets confusing if both month and date are 12 or lower and the format wasn't specified ahead of time
Yeah. Had issues getting ID when I first came to US. They mixed up my date of birth, and I needed to go get it corrected. I didn't even notice it until I almost missed a flight trying to use that ID, which didn't match with their system. Fortunately I also had my passport with me.
Because when usually dates formatted on number follow a descending or ascending order. Year -> Month -> Day or Day -> Month -> Year.
mm/dd/yyyy is:
-- Month <- Day | Year <-
It's not only strange but is also not easy to parse and can be confused with dd/mm/yyyy
Because they're teenagers. In the real world nobody actually gives a fuck. Call me weird, but the different formats have never caused me a single instant of confusion in my entire life.
As a developer, this has been an annoying and oftentimes confusing source of additional work for me.
Yup. I use ISO 8601 for any record keeping, but much like how I don't bother with good spelling and grammer it doesn't matter in comments on the internet
As an American immigrant in Germany, I encounter it somewhat regularly and it still doesn’t matter.
It was a bit of a problem when they thought I forged my covid vaccination card, because I got a shot on January tenth or something. I would then explain that I’m American and we do that. 80% of the time, they had no more questions, 20% of the time I’d show my drivers license birthday for proof (luckily I was born after the 12th).
The things that are actually problematic are the unknown tools used for my dental work (my implant screw is going to need to get a custom screwdriver made for it), and understanding temperature at an intuitive level. I understand the common weather numbers, but do I want coffee that’s 55 degrees or 70 degrees? No idea until I convert. Luckily, it’s the easiest conversion to do.
Not once on my life have i known what temperature my coffee is or should be.
That’s fair. I work at a bakery and make a lot of coffee in Celsius
Different languages. In German you never say "Juli der 4." it's always "der 4. Juli". (I am sure someone will proof me wrong by digging up some weird old text, but it's still never used in day to day conversation)
I assume it's similar for other languages as well.
So when you need to guess what 10-04-2024 means, it matters a lot