USA is the edgy teen after moving out of the parents house (Europe) and finally doing stuff their own way. Not because it is practical, but because they feel rebellious.
Majority of the world uses YYYY-MM-DD. Day 1st makes no sense. If you need the month or year it should come 1st. You need to zoom into what you need not select from any number of months with the same day. That would be like putting time with seconds 1st.
Just don't care and use them. People understand them. Maybe they're not used to hearing it, but it doesn't matter. This is what I do and never cam across someone who was so dense that he didn't understand me. I also never had someone tell me that it was strange to do so.
We wouldn't in America in most cases. I'd say it's August 9th 2023. I honestly feel like this is such a dumb argument to have because it doesn't matter except for communication with people who use other methods. Now metric vs imperial makes way more sense to me because the metric system is just so much easier for mathematical conversions.
In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.
Lmao Europe is not the only place where they use metric (I'm not European).
Seconds are part of the metric system and are the base unit of time. Just because they didn't define it initially doesn't mean it doesn't exist or makes sense. They use milliseconds and kiloseconds; minutes and hours are used for convenience but are not part of the SI
This is actually often done when trying to be more eloquent or dramatic or add importance, like how Independence day is The 4th of July versus just saying Jily 4th.
People rarely use them in real life, but ISO 8601 and RFC 3339 (both are almost identical) are the most natural ways of writing date and time. Just like how we write numbers, their components are written from left to right in the decreasing order of significance: yyyy-mm-ddTHH:MM:SS. I like it by default for precisely the reason you mentioned - sorting. It even helps quick visual comparisons.
It's quite simple really. The order is "small to big". You start with the smallest unit, in this case the day. Then follows the next largest unit, the month, and finally the year. Basically the same as in the top picture, but in reverse order.
He's making a pedantic joke. Lower case m is sometimes used to indicate minutes.
Albeit a weak one since many formats use lowercase m to indicate month. Such as programming languages like python & PHP. IBM & Microsoft standards also use lowercase m and so forth.
If you it's the stupidest shit then you never tried to figure out why you can't log in to VPN for 2h just to realize password expired week ago but you looked at the date and thought you still have 3 weeks till expires
I use Fahrenheit just because it's a pain to get everything set to Celsius and other Americans don't understand it. But I use grams, kilos, millilitres, kilometres, etc. Yes. And if someone asks me to guess the length of an object I will give centimetres, and refuse to translate to inches and their stupid fractions.
I kind of get it, it's like language immersion. How do you easily describe anything besides the freezing point and boiling point of water in an objective way? The rest, you can point to and say "this weighs a kilo" ot "this holds a liter." And if you don't force people to use it, they'll simply refuse. And we all carry handy unit conversion tools with us wherever we go these days, so if they don't want to learn, they can easily translate it themselves.
So you use Fahrenheit because Americans don't understand Celsius but you don't convert to imperial for them if they don't understand? That just seems inconsiderate as it's really no trouble at all
If it’s a file I want sorted by date the top is good. If I am talking about a date and spelling it out August the 9th of 2023 makes the most sense and seems natural, and if it’s a personal memo or date label on food I just use 08/09 with the zeros so I know it isn’t a fraction unless it’s frozen or shelf stable for long term storage where the year would be useful to know at which point it becomes 8/9/23
I thought everybody used different date formats based on need.
In UK we always say 9th of August 2023, ie the way our dates are written and i would say is more natural haha. Maybe Americans find it more natural the other way around because your dates are other way around. If you use the date system the uk has maybe it would sound more natural to speak perhaps.
I grew up on RuneScape and BBC programming, so I’ve been exposed to both formats for a long time (really fucked me up in spelling). I couldn’t say why August 9th sounds more natural, but it’s probably because most irl folks around me use it. The 9th of August didn’t sound bad, just more artificial, and it’s probably because my exposure to that spoken out was mostly media and pop culture.
No, the US just chose this order and speaks it the same way. I don't speak it this way, you're just used to it (just like everyone is to the way they speak it)
For actually displaying dates to others, I agree that spelling out the month is absolutely preferred. But if space is limited, you're somewhat required to pick a very shortened format, and the US version is dumb, even if that's what you should use when displaying in that locale.
But for working with dates on computers, year-month-day works great, because it's still human readable, is naturally sortable, and makes it easier for serialization.
The first one is conventionally never year-day-month, and if anyone ever sent me a date of 2023-17-08, I would respond with, "What the hell?! Are you being evil on purpose?"
I don't know why you wanted to know year before month or day, I use dd/mm/yyyy sometime I didn't even use yyyy just dd/mm because day change most frequent then month then year
Because it gets horribly fucky when you now have to figure out if a date is actually formatted as MM-DD-YY or DD-MM-YY.
Surely we've all handled reading an expiration date before and have wondered if we're eating something OK or has expired months ago because they chose the other format.
(Honestly, I think both formats are shit, and the only correct way to do dates with numbers only is YYYY-MM-DD. If not, then at least use letters for months, like 30 AUG 2023)
When you say "don't store dates as a string" what you're really saying is "wait for someone else to solve the problem and release a library, then use that library". That seems to be what the majority of the industry does (I'm a Java coder myself and joda is a lifesaver in that regard) but my point is that this problem is hard. Date and time stamps are a subtly difficult part of the average API monkey's daily work.
Americans pick up weird habits and then insist that it's the right way. How is August 9th any better than 9th of August when the 9th is a subunit of August and not the other way around?
Another good example is the use of the imperial system. I've heard Americans often declare that it's a better system for manual use compared to the metric system. But the metric system has prefixes that differ consistently by 3 orders of magnitude, whereas the imperial system has rather arbitrary jumps between each successive unit. The metric system needs much less cognitive effort even for manual use.
I can understand that it's a matter of habit for Americans. But it's the lack of acceptance that there is a problem that leads to other problems like crashing a spacecraft onto Mars.
Generally speaking you're usually from 0 to 720 hours in a month: how many time in a year you have to remind people what month they are into vs. the single day?
Guy A: "Hey, what day is it?"
Guy B: "It's Sunday, the 13th."
Guy A: "Of...?" (gesturing to keep going)
Guy B: "Ah, right, we're just 390 hours into August. You may have missed that."
That's what kills me about people who rag on Americans.
We order our dates the way we say them, and we use a temperature system is a great way to describe feeling heat.
I've got no defense for imperial measurements beyond scooping up a cup of flour is easier than dumping it on a scale.
But people spend more energy shitting on the cultural norms of Americans than anyone else (especially Europeans) and then spend a lot of time telling us we have no culture.
and we use a temperature system is a great way to describe feeling heat
You know if you really think about it for even the slightest amount of time this makes absolutely no fucking sense. I can imagine why you state this, but to not spoil the fun I'd love to hear it from you.
The fahrenheit scale was created as a base for human temperature. The guy fucked up his math though because 100°f was supposed to be average body temp.
I don't see how intent is relevant, to someone using Celsius, 40 degrees is hot because they're used to that, that's the only thing that matters. Besides, when it comes to body temperature, Celsius is a lot closer than Fahrenheit. Not to mention "it's freezing outside" in Celsius is actually sub zero, and not a number close to your body temperature as it is in Fahrenheit.
Fahrenheit based his scale on what he thought to be absolute zero (i.e. the coldest temperature he could produce in his lab with the tools of his time) and his body temperature, which he set to 12, because 12 was a convenient number and used in a lot of scales in his pre-metric time. He did realize though that this scale was impractical, and halved his degrees until they deemed sensible to him, resulting in the final degrees to be ⅛ of the first draft. 8 * 12 = 96, hence 96° F was his second fixed point.
Which is just senseless, as we know today, as the temperature of the human body fluctuates over time. If we took the original definition seriously, everybody would have their own Fahrenheit scale that would differ over time.
Fahrenheit is not based on body temperature, it is based on the temperature of a mixture of ice and salt and the body temperature of a certain individual, both in 1714. Who was, by the way, suffering from hypothermia.
USA is the edgy teen after moving out of the parents house (Europe) and finally doing stuff their own way. Not because it is practical, but because they feel rebellious.
Lol, This is probably the best explanation of America that I've ever heard.🤣👍🏾
Many of us are not from Europe
What year are you living in, 1951?
USA was colonized by europeans mostly, I believe ?
The Cajun were french Canadians
20% of the population in 1776 were slaves who came from Africa. There are more countries outside Europe
Not like the Europeans colonized those African countries at the time.
The Scramble for Africa happened after the USA was established as a country
Oh, these were definitely not the people who decided how to handle/name/format stuff, sadly...
20% is a lot ! there are more countries that..? I think you forgot a word
Date Formats:
Aug 9, 20239 Aug, 20238/9/2023 US9/8/2023 GB2023/8/9Correct Date Formats:
9 AUG, Juche 112 ✅
2023-08-09
Only for files
The Necromancers Calendar
*9 AUG, Douche 112✅️😉
Majority of the world uses YYYY-MM-DD. Day 1st makes no sense. If you need the month or year it should come 1st. You need to zoom into what you need not select from any number of months with the same day. That would be like putting time with seconds 1st.
Not really, most countries use YYYY-MM-DD to save documents, photos or archive papers.
DD-MM-YYYY is for daily usage.
DD/MM/YYYY is the best in my opinion
YYYY-MM-DD is better if you need to sort
If it weren't so ingrained, I would be permanently using YYYY-MM-DD instead of DD/MM/YYYY.
Works great for east Asia, and it sorts!
I'd also like to advocate for using 24 time in speech.
See you at 21 tomorrow :)
Just don't care and use them. People understand them. Maybe they're not used to hearing it, but it doesn't matter. This is what I do and never cam across someone who was so dense that he didn't understand me. I also never had someone tell me that it was strange to do so.
I agree with this because if you were to say the whole thing verbally, you generally start with the day, the month then the year.
"It is the 9th of August in the year of our Lord 2023."
We wouldn't in America in most cases. I'd say it's August 9th 2023. I honestly feel like this is such a dumb argument to have because it doesn't matter except for communication with people who use other methods. Now metric vs imperial makes way more sense to me because the metric system is just so much easier for mathematical conversions.
I like how Europeans pretend they're all scientific, but then still use seconds, minutes, and hours without thinking twice.
Lmao Europe is not the only place where they use metric (I'm not European).
Seconds are part of the metric system and are the base unit of time. Just because they didn't define it initially doesn't mean it doesn't exist or makes sense. They use milliseconds and kiloseconds; minutes and hours are used for convenience but are not part of the SI
In the USA most people would say “august 9th”, not “the 9th of august”, which is one of the reasons mm/dd/yyyy is the standard format here
Which extrapolated, who the fuck would say “the September of 2024” and not “September, 2024” for example
This is actually often done when trying to be more eloquent or dramatic or add importance, like how Independence day is The 4th of July versus just saying Jily 4th.
Then use DD-MM-YYYY or any other character.
Okay but if you sort by name then the file:
08-09-2023.png
is after:
04-12-2023.png
Because everything would be sort after the day number.
Then get software that recognizes a simple format like that because that's a nightmare.
DD?MM?YYYY
09.08.2023 (dd/mm/yyyy) anybody?
I like it for reading and using the date day to day
But yyy-mm-dd is best for sorting and archiving files
This
People rarely use them in real life, but ISO 8601 and RFC 3339 (both are almost identical) are the most natural ways of writing date and time. Just like how we write numbers, their components are written from left to right in the decreasing order of significance: yyyy-mm-ddTHH:MM:SS. I like it by default for precisely the reason you mentioned - sorting. It even helps quick visual comparisons.
It's dd/MM/yyyy you nincompoop
@Chev @rr7, Sunday 13.08.2023 here
Why would you put the day first?
Because it changes most often.
Why does that mean it should go first?
Because you are able to read the thing that changes most often first. It is more convinient to read from left to right.
ISO 8601 or nothing. Descending order of granularity, keep everything sorted as it should be!
My personal preference is DD-MM-AAAA, but as someone that works with lots of data from different formats and timezones... I have to agree with you...
YYYYMMDD and UTC should be the global default.
annum annum annum annum
RFC 3339, because ISO is not free.
Tell me more? I can look it up but I'm curious if anybody ever got problems from using a standard like that
ISO charges for their standards
https://www.iso.org/store.html
I've said it once and I will say it again:
mkdir -p 2023/{January,February,March,April,May,June,July,August,Septembet,October,November,December}Warning: not POSIX
ew ew ew no please no :'(
Oh my god, why would they do this
Why no? It will make your life way easier
Aug 9, 2023and08/09/23literally say the same thing.They do but one informs the reader of the order of the format while the other doesn’t.
Look it's easy, you just wait until the 13th of the month to figure out which format it is. Is 12 days really so much to ask?
August 9th 2023 would be 09.08.2023 in Germany though 😉
Also changing it to periods doesn't avoid confusion about the order. Also pretty sure we fought a whole war over not being like the Germans, so...
It's quite simple really. The order is "small to big". You start with the smallest unit, in this case the day. Then follows the next largest unit, the month, and finally the year. Basically the same as in the top picture, but in reverse order.
The first isn’t ambiguous at all; the second is hella ambiguous.
It's only ambiguous because there's a second standard.
Is 08/09/2023 August or September? What about 08.09.2023? Do you see where the problem lies?
08/09/23 literally says the 8th day of september.
That’s why I write 9 Aug ‘23
No, the second one says "Sept. 8th 2023" and that last panel is obviously British (you can tell by the teeth) /s
Goddamn German memes invading everywhere.
Can’t believe relevant xkcd hasn’t been posted.
I was unaware of this. But it uses the same logic as the British date format so I am okay with it.
Is this where someone posts the relevant xkcd about too many standards?
That standard can go fuck itself
The correct standard is dd/mm/yyyy
Why would you have minutes inbetween there and not months?
? I do have months in the "mm"
He's making a pedantic joke. Lower case m is sometimes used to indicate minutes.
Albeit a weak one since many formats use lowercase m to indicate month. Such as programming languages like python & PHP. IBM & Microsoft standards also use lowercase m and so forth.
Yeah it's a bit mixed bag. Powershell command get-date expects mm for minutes and MM for months, which has messed up my scripts logging few times lol
I did think he might be making a joke but since as you said it would be a weak one I gave him the benifit of the doubt
Last two are both dumb, YYYY-MM-DD or DD-MM-YYYY or go home
Yes I'm American
The last two are the same thing though
The last one is ambiguous because it could be either august ninth or september eigth.
Reddit ass post
I swear, a lot of you would have no joy in life if you weren't able to bitch about the stupidest shit.
If you it's the stupidest shit then you never tried to figure out why you can't log in to VPN for 2h just to realize password expired week ago but you looked at the date and thought you still have 3 weeks till expires
Small things and stupid things are different
09/08/2023 (I'm an American who doesn't care what everyone in my country uses if that "custom" is nonsense...)
Im a Canadian, and unfortunetely we use both formats, with no context.
Which is why written down or typed without a format prompt I use "12 Aug 2023"
Do you use metric? :)
I use Fahrenheit just because it's a pain to get everything set to Celsius and other Americans don't understand it. But I use grams, kilos, millilitres, kilometres, etc. Yes. And if someone asks me to guess the length of an object I will give centimetres, and refuse to translate to inches and their stupid fractions.
Some proud neckbeard shit right here. "Fuck communicating effectively with people. They don't even know I only use the metric system!"
But yeah, got em... I guess.
I kind of get it, it's like language immersion. How do you easily describe anything besides the freezing point and boiling point of water in an objective way? The rest, you can point to and say "this weighs a kilo" ot "this holds a liter." And if you don't force people to use it, they'll simply refuse. And we all carry handy unit conversion tools with us wherever we go these days, so if they don't want to learn, they can easily translate it themselves.
So you use Fahrenheit because Americans don't understand Celsius but you don't convert to imperial for them if they don't understand? That just seems inconsiderate as it's really no trouble at all
Based
9AUG2023
HOLY
Unix time is the best format
Amount of seconds since midnight Jan 1st 1970 or sod off
Only until 2038-01-19
Date stamps are stupid, but they're nowhere near as stupid as this attempt to criticize them
13/AUG/2023
If it’s a file I want sorted by date the top is good. If I am talking about a date and spelling it out August the 9th of 2023 makes the most sense and seems natural, and if it’s a personal memo or date label on food I just use 08/09 with the zeros so I know it isn’t a fraction unless it’s frozen or shelf stable for long term storage where the year would be useful to know at which point it becomes 8/9/23
I thought everybody used different date formats based on need.
In UK we always say 9th of August 2023, ie the way our dates are written and i would say is more natural haha. Maybe Americans find it more natural the other way around because your dates are other way around. If you use the date system the uk has maybe it would sound more natural to speak perhaps.
I grew up on RuneScape and BBC programming, so I’ve been exposed to both formats for a long time (really fucked me up in spelling). I couldn’t say why August 9th sounds more natural, but it’s probably because most irl folks around me use it. The 9th of August didn’t sound bad, just more artificial, and it’s probably because my exposure to that spoken out was mostly media and pop culture.
These are the right dates
The way I see it, the US just writes it the way it's spoken. "August 9th, 2023" vs. "the 9th of August, 2023".
Sorry, guess I forgot about that classic American holiday, July 4th
That is indeed how many Americans say it.
That also doesn't make a lot of sense though, does it. In my language, the day comes first. Also when spoken.
It does in real English too.
No, the US just chose this order and speaks it the same way. I don't speak it this way, you're just used to it (just like everyone is to the way they speak it)
Yeah, but in proper English, as spoken in England, we would say "9th of August, not August the 9th"
Just like the comment above mine wrote it
The first and the last date format are terrible because you can confuse the day of the month with the number of the month.
I only like date formats where it's not possible to confuse any field, like 8 Aug 2023. I minimize ambiguity.
If the date is in a file name, I make an exception using 2023-08-09 such that a string sort is equal to a date sort.
For actually displaying dates to others, I agree that spelling out the month is absolutely preferred. But if space is limited, you're somewhat required to pick a very shortened format, and the US version is dumb, even if that's what you should use when displaying in that locale.
But for working with dates on computers, year-month-day works great, because it's still human readable, is naturally sortable, and makes it easier for serialization.
The first one is conventionally never year-day-month, and if anyone ever sent me a date of 2023-17-08, I would respond with, "What the hell?! Are you being evil on purpose?"
Oh no! A country uses a different date format, the horror!
23/12/08
Canada moment
This triggers on so many levels. Why do Americans hate logic
😡
I don't know why you wanted to know year before month or day, I use dd/mm/yyyy sometime I didn't even use yyyy just dd/mm because day change most frequent then month then year
YYYY-MM-DD is best when programming because it's unambiguous and it makes sorting easier. For humans DD-MM-YYYY is indeed the most sensible.
Most sensible is a matter of opinion
If you're talking dd/mm then mm/dd makes more sense, like a clock.
🧐 4 Days ago
Nah the middle one is the easiest to read.
I like to think of the American style as machete ordering for dates.
Alright, then I guess change the way you read a clock too... My day to day use doesn't include the year at all. Just mm/dd
Why change the way you read a clock? year/month/day hour:minute:second
You would never read a clock as minute:second:hour, which is analagous to how Americans phrase dates.
Lot of people say "half passed" or "quarter 'til" and optionally include the hour.
I don't, but some people do.
The 12-hour system is similar to this issue
One of my biggest gripes when I worked at Walmart in the claims dept.
I would always have to double check items because some are sources from the US and use the US date format while the rest is in the normal format.
BB really needs to have what format was used or labels need to be printed for US sources pantry items.
ISO standards... unbelievable how many people don't get it!
It's by smallest integer to largest, what's weird about that?
12 months a year, up to 31 days a month and X number of years. It makes the most sense
Because it gets horribly fucky when you now have to figure out if a date is actually formatted as MM-DD-YY or DD-MM-YY.
Surely we've all handled reading an expiration date before and have wondered if we're eating something OK or has expired months ago because they chose the other format.
(Honestly, I think both formats are shit, and the only correct way to do dates with numbers only is YYYY-MM-DD. If not, then at least use letters for months, like 30 AUG 2023)
It should be ordered by significance (ideally descending). USA's date is like putting the million between the thousands and the unit.
No, I haven't, and I don't know anyone else who has
Then you've never bought imported food or never got food gifts overseas. Or never travelled to a country that used the format that you don't use.
For example, 06/09/2023 could mean either you're eating something that expires next month, or expired two months ago.
Try to figure out a way to sort it automatically and get back to me on why it's stupid
Easy. Don't store dates as a text string. That's just bad programming.
When you say "don't store dates as a string" what you're really saying is "wait for someone else to solve the problem and release a library, then use that library". That seems to be what the majority of the industry does (I'm a Java coder myself and joda is a lifesaver in that regard) but my point is that this problem is hard. Date and time stamps are a subtly difficult part of the average API monkey's daily work.
Months are dumb. Inconsistent lengths, the names are out of sync (OCTober isn't month 8), pretend to be based on lunar cycles but not, etc.
Give us Year/Day date formats. Extra new year holiday on leap years.
You can blame that on the Romans. October was the eighth month.
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Americans write the date the way we would say it. August 9th 2023.
9th of August, 2023
No need for the extra "of"
4th of July
That's a holiday and an obvious exception. Most people don't go around saying dates like that
Americans pick up weird habits and then insist that it's the right way. How is August 9th any better than 9th of August when the 9th is a subunit of August and not the other way around?
Another good example is the use of the imperial system. I've heard Americans often declare that it's a better system for manual use compared to the metric system. But the metric system has prefixes that differ consistently by 3 orders of magnitude, whereas the imperial system has rather arbitrary jumps between each successive unit. The metric system needs much less cognitive effort even for manual use.
I can understand that it's a matter of habit for Americans. But it's the lack of acceptance that there is a problem that leads to other problems like crashing a spacecraft onto Mars.
Generally speaking you're usually from 0 to 720 hours in a month: how many time in a year you have to remind people what month they are into vs. the single day?
Guy A: "Hey, what day is it?"
Guy B: "It's Sunday, the 13th."
Guy A: "Of...?" (gesturing to keep going)
Guy B: "Ah, right, we're just 390 hours into August. You may have missed that."
That's in response to a poorly asked question.
"Hey what's the date?
"August 13th"
Wait, you mean the last 2 are, in all fact, the same, exact, thing?
Yes.
That's what kills me about people who rag on Americans.
We order our dates the way we say them, and we use a temperature system is a great way to describe feeling heat.
I've got no defense for imperial measurements beyond scooping up a cup of flour is easier than dumping it on a scale.
But people spend more energy shitting on the cultural norms of Americans than anyone else (especially Europeans) and then spend a lot of time telling us we have no culture.
You know if you really think about it for even the slightest amount of time this makes absolutely no fucking sense. I can imagine why you state this, but to not spoil the fun I'd love to hear it from you.
The fahrenheit scale was created as a base for human temperature. The guy fucked up his math though because 100°f was supposed to be average body temp.
Celsius is temperature based on water.
Kelvin is based on universal scale.
Fahrenheit is based on the human body.
I don't see how intent is relevant, to someone using Celsius, 40 degrees is hot because they're used to that, that's the only thing that matters. Besides, when it comes to body temperature, Celsius is a lot closer than Fahrenheit. Not to mention "it's freezing outside" in Celsius is actually sub zero, and not a number close to your body temperature as it is in Fahrenheit.
Fahrenheit based his scale on what he thought to be absolute zero (i.e. the coldest temperature he could produce in his lab with the tools of his time) and his body temperature, which he set to 12, because 12 was a convenient number and used in a lot of scales in his pre-metric time. He did realize though that this scale was impractical, and halved his degrees until they deemed sensible to him, resulting in the final degrees to be ⅛ of the first draft. 8 * 12 = 96, hence 96° F was his second fixed point.
Which is just senseless, as we know today, as the temperature of the human body fluctuates over time. If we took the original definition seriously, everybody would have their own Fahrenheit scale that would differ over time.
Fahrenheit is not based on body temperature, it is based on the temperature of a mixture of ice and salt and the body temperature of a certain individual, both in 1714. Who was, by the way, suffering from hypothermia.
In theory yes stupid, in practice I've never been confused once. Its fine guys, why's it such a massive issue for everyone?
My clock says the time is 45:09:00. Should feel so natural to anyone in the US, right?
Gonna cry?
(1-12)/(1-31)/(XXXX)
I don't think it's an entirely ridiculous format.