Only American and Swahili use mm/dd for dates
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Oh, and Micronesia. At least according to Wikipedia. So why does pretty much every US based service that caters to a worldwide audience use mm/dd/yyyy as a date format Latest example this hour is VS team services "Access issues with Visual Studio Team Services – 5/25 – Investigating". 5/25 = 25 May. That's easy. But when I see 6/7 or 10/8 I have to manually check the site and see what culture they are based in. No one in the US (I'm guessing - apart from ex-pats) worry about this. Or are probably even aware of this issue. Everyone else in every other country is aware of this issue. Everyone in Canada manages to deal with it. And I don't know how their brains don't explode. Canada uses dd/mm/yyyy. Except when it uses mm/dd/yyyy because either it's a US based company, they are using a US based system, they are trying to be nice to their US based customers, because they just forgot to use dd/mm/yyyy or because they know it's me and so they deliberately use an ambiguous date format to do my head in. Date formats in Canada are totally and completely messed up. So: Why, in this day and age, do those in the US, when writing for an international audience, still use mm/dd/yyyy? (And I'll add another one: Why do companies in the US find it impossible to ship outside the US? It's very odd) OK, back to hitting refresh several times a second waiting for Team Services to come back online.
cheers Chris Maunder
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You really don't get it: YYYYMMDD can be sorted trivially, whether sorted as an integer or a character string (so long as the year contains 4 figures w.r.t. char sorting). The computer can read any of the dates and the overhead for that is the same. But, if sorting the dates, they have to be parsed/interpreted before sorting (or within a custom sorting function - same thing) - and the work is a lot harder . . . unless the formatting of the date is such that it's naturally in order without any parsing/interpretation. As for truncation of DNS - it's something you mentioned. The DNS masks would seem to be a hint as to how things are more likely done - although I'm no expert in that field. Handling native sizes, however, is what will happen in the system, anyway - so (originally, in those days) a 32 bit value is going to be a 32 bit value as it's passed through the 32 bit system/CPU. Unwanted values would be masked, not truncated. But I'll let you claim expertise in that matter.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
"Trivially" under a number of conditions. You state one of them yourself: The year must always be specified in a four digit format. That isn't always done (look at the expiration date of your plastic card!). Second: People find an 8-digit sequence hard to read, and won't accept that machine oriented format you specify, but split it up. One date split with slashes, 2001/09/11, and another with hyphens, 2016-05-26, do not sort trivially (beyond the year) until you remove the separators that you simply must allow for readability. And then pops another issue up: 2016-5-16 will not trivially sort correct with 2016-05-26. Many people do not number months in their daily life, but would like to write 2016-May-26. Then you mess up the soring completely... As long as you insist on forcing onto ordinary people what they don't want, but you insist that it suits the computer better, you end up like the Linux success on the desktop: People choose something else, something that matches their preferences and conventions better.
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Not to mention time zones, winter and summer time, formatting, parsing, the time part of dates, leap years, different ranges in different types/systems, timespans vs. datetimes... Yeah, it's about time someone lost his mind X|
Read my (free) ebook Object-Oriented Programming in C# Succinctly. Visit my blog at Sander's bits - Writing the code you need. Or read my articles here on CodeProject.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. — Edsger W. Dijkstra
Regards, Sander
+1 to time! Why the hell we should deal with these idiotic am/pm/fm/zm?? Just to say 23:17 and viola - everybody knows when it is! Same with "timezones" - another world-wide stupidity! One time can fit all. Who care I wake up at 8:00 or 23:00?? If daylight in my country will be from 23:00...15:00, it won't affect my life even on a cent. So when it's 17:23 in England, let it be everywhere! In any case before calling my friend in Japan I confirm they have daytime. This unification immediately simplifies a lot of schedules and calculations (hi, DBMS!). When you depart from Australia at 3:00, you arrive _at_calculable_time_ in US and you don't have to think how much hours is difference between timezones.
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"Trivially" under a number of conditions. You state one of them yourself: The year must always be specified in a four digit format. That isn't always done (look at the expiration date of your plastic card!). Second: People find an 8-digit sequence hard to read, and won't accept that machine oriented format you specify, but split it up. One date split with slashes, 2001/09/11, and another with hyphens, 2016-05-26, do not sort trivially (beyond the year) until you remove the separators that you simply must allow for readability. And then pops another issue up: 2016-5-16 will not trivially sort correct with 2016-05-26. Many people do not number months in their daily life, but would like to write 2016-May-26. Then you mess up the soring completely... As long as you insist on forcing onto ordinary people what they don't want, but you insist that it suits the computer better, you end up like the Linux success on the desktop: People choose something else, something that matches their preferences and conventions better.
First, the hypen and slash delimited versions of YYYYMMDD still sort trivially as text. But let's get to the real point. Go back to my original posting (reply) way up at the top of the thread. I said I use YYYYMMDD . You can come up with any number of ways that things won't work - but if they don't follow the above then their relevance is, well, none.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
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You do know that computers don't give a damn about data format so long as they know how to interpret it. Why the DNS order is like it is? Truncation would make a good reason: it's as easy to truncate the front as the back (same, to, with masking, so far as that goes). If there's to be any controversy as to why either choice, I'd look at the every famous Motorola vs. Intel format for storage of numerical values: Big Endian vs. Little Endian. Both work - so long as you know what's coming. Now for the date formatting which I noted, above, one could argue that the US method is better if you leave off the year (not uncommon) for then it can be sorted naturally. The Euro-system is part of the same Obsessive-Compulsive disaster that brought on the metric system. I draw your attention to the following that you may realize the error of your ways: The Lounge - CodeProject[^] and even in my youth, oh so many years ago, The Lounge - CodeProject[^]
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
Really? Is the metric system a disaster? So you consider that using fractions of 10th 0.001 mm = 1 micrometer 1 mm 10 mm = 1 centimeter 100 mm = 1 decimeter 1000 mm = 1 meter 1000000 mm = 1000 mt = 1 kilometer is a mess? Vs 1/2", 1/4", 1/8"....1/64".. 1/256", 1'-3/16", 23 yards 2' - 5/32" 1 mile = 1760 yd???; 1 yd = 3 feet???; 1 feet = 12 inches??? 1760 - 3 - 12 Really? I really don't think the imperial system is much clear to a person that never have used this measurement system. The other one is much logical to our brains. Maybe the base-10 numeric system is not the best, but we at our actual civilization adopted it (Including the imperial units users), maybe because we have 10 fingers on our hands? For whatever reason, our occidental brains think in 10, so I think that the metric system is an approximation to our feeling, not a disaster!!
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Really? Is the metric system a disaster? So you consider that using fractions of 10th 0.001 mm = 1 micrometer 1 mm 10 mm = 1 centimeter 100 mm = 1 decimeter 1000 mm = 1 meter 1000000 mm = 1000 mt = 1 kilometer is a mess? Vs 1/2", 1/4", 1/8"....1/64".. 1/256", 1'-3/16", 23 yards 2' - 5/32" 1 mile = 1760 yd???; 1 yd = 3 feet???; 1 feet = 12 inches??? 1760 - 3 - 12 Really? I really don't think the imperial system is much clear to a person that never have used this measurement system. The other one is much logical to our brains. Maybe the base-10 numeric system is not the best, but we at our actual civilization adopted it (Including the imperial units users), maybe because we have 10 fingers on our hands? For whatever reason, our occidental brains think in 10, so I think that the metric system is an approximation to our feeling, not a disaster!!
You seemed to have missed the point. This is CP - we do computer stuff (and some drink Gin). The weights/measures I specified are all powers of 2 - very computer friendly for inter-conversion. On a historical basis, note that you happen to use base ten for that metric trash because you've ten fingers. For a century or two, those more enlightened[^] (i.e., they didn't need to count on their fingers) argued for a switch to base-12 for everything. The reason? 10 has two factors besides itself and one: 2, 5 12 has four factors: 2, 3, 4 and 6 The factors are used in more typical human-friendly transactions 1/2, 1/4, 1/3, for example. So, you guys keep counting on your fingers whilst we embrace our current reality and look to the future!
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
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You do know that computers don't give a damn about data format so long as they know how to interpret it. Why the DNS order is like it is? Truncation would make a good reason: it's as easy to truncate the front as the back (same, to, with masking, so far as that goes). If there's to be any controversy as to why either choice, I'd look at the every famous Motorola vs. Intel format for storage of numerical values: Big Endian vs. Little Endian. Both work - so long as you know what's coming. Now for the date formatting which I noted, above, one could argue that the US method is better if you leave off the year (not uncommon) for then it can be sorted naturally. The Euro-system is part of the same Obsessive-Compulsive disaster that brought on the metric system. I draw your attention to the following that you may realize the error of your ways: The Lounge - CodeProject[^] and even in my youth, oh so many years ago, The Lounge - CodeProject[^]
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
Natural sorting is only advantageous to computers, and they don't deal with partial dates. I can't remember ever needing to write code that handled dates in the form of strings that didn't even include the year. So that's not really a bonus. Come on, admit it: the US convention simply makes very poor sense - a fact supported by the fact that almost the entire rest of the world does it the other way round. Also, the metric system is great, not sure what you've got against that as well.
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Natural sorting is only advantageous to computers, and they don't deal with partial dates. I can't remember ever needing to write code that handled dates in the form of strings that didn't even include the year. So that's not really a bonus. Come on, admit it: the US convention simply makes very poor sense - a fact supported by the fact that almost the entire rest of the world does it the other way round. Also, the metric system is great, not sure what you've got against that as well.
You really love the context of d/m/y. Be here (in the leading English speaking nation in the world) we would say something like May 26th 2016. M/D/Y . In other words, it's the natural translation of language. Of your native speech works differently - enjoy - but don't tread on me. Note that the common speech of the world is becoming English - because (unlike the French, for example) we welcome into our language all the various and colorful extension that keep enhancing its expressive nature. You will be assimilated ! So - get with the program: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, . . . the power of powers of two!
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
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First, the hypen and slash delimited versions of YYYYMMDD still sort trivially as text. But let's get to the real point. Go back to my original posting (reply) way up at the top of the thread. I said I use YYYYMMDD . You can come up with any number of ways that things won't work - but if they don't follow the above then their relevance is, well, none.
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
W∴ Balboos wrote:
First, the hypen and slash delimited versions of YYYYMMDD still sort trivially as text.
Sure - as long as everybody uses the same separator. But not everyone does. Finding a truly trivial sorting problem is not a trivial task... :-) Especially not in multi-national environments. You believe that alphabetic sorting is trivial? What about a common Scandianvian telephone book with Norwegian and Swedish names? The Norwegian alphabet goes ...wxyzæøå, while the Swedish goes ...wxyzåäö - the ä and æ are (from both sides) considered the same letter, as is ö and ø. So where should å be sorted: Before æø or after æø? Or French, where you sort by the alphabetic character as the primary key, but two words differ in accents (which quite often is the case in French), they are not identical, and the sort order of the accents, as a secondary key, is well defined. Or Spanish, where certain double letters are sorted as a single letter, but not in an identical manner: I believe (disclaimer: I cannot speak Spanish myself) that ll is one case: The double ll is sorted as a if it were a single letter between l and m in the alphabet. These details does not relate to your highly "synthetic" format that is not acceptable for use by common man. It is nothing but a lab prototype. That is what I wanted to stress as "the real point". We could simplify sorting of dates by using the day number of the year - abandoning months and day within month completely: Problem solved! Or we could use Unix epoch: Geek & Poke, 20081221[^] (For those who have not yet discovered Geek & Poke: That is the greatest source of computer geek humour I have ever seen!) Obviously, a list of eight digit decimal numbers can be trivially sorted. But is is about as useless as sorting a ten digit number such as 1229883309. Well, not quite, but if people won't accept that eight digit decimal number, then it is of no help that it will trivially sort.
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Oh, and Micronesia. At least according to Wikipedia. So why does pretty much every US based service that caters to a worldwide audience use mm/dd/yyyy as a date format Latest example this hour is VS team services "Access issues with Visual Studio Team Services – 5/25 – Investigating". 5/25 = 25 May. That's easy. But when I see 6/7 or 10/8 I have to manually check the site and see what culture they are based in. No one in the US (I'm guessing - apart from ex-pats) worry about this. Or are probably even aware of this issue. Everyone else in every other country is aware of this issue. Everyone in Canada manages to deal with it. And I don't know how their brains don't explode. Canada uses dd/mm/yyyy. Except when it uses mm/dd/yyyy because either it's a US based company, they are using a US based system, they are trying to be nice to their US based customers, because they just forgot to use dd/mm/yyyy or because they know it's me and so they deliberately use an ambiguous date format to do my head in. Date formats in Canada are totally and completely messed up. So: Why, in this day and age, do those in the US, when writing for an international audience, still use mm/dd/yyyy? (And I'll add another one: Why do companies in the US find it impossible to ship outside the US? It's very odd) OK, back to hitting refresh several times a second waiting for Team Services to come back online.
cheers Chris Maunder
Working for the Navy for 20+ years, I always refer to dates as DAY-MONTH-YEAR, but I write out (or speak) the month to avoid ambiguity. So 26 May 2016, not 26/5/2016 or 5/26/2015. Or in true Naval Message Traffic style, 26MAY16. Be the change you want to see.
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You really love the context of d/m/y. Be here (in the leading English speaking nation in the world) we would say something like May 26th 2016. M/D/Y . In other words, it's the natural translation of language. Of your native speech works differently - enjoy - but don't tread on me. Note that the common speech of the world is becoming English - because (unlike the French, for example) we welcome into our language all the various and colorful extension that keep enhancing its expressive nature. You will be assimilated ! So - get with the program: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, . . . the power of powers of two!
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
Actually we - that is, the British - often say it that way too, although it is more common to say it as M-D-Y, especially when including the year. But my point is that basing a written, numerical short-form notation purely on natural language (which is variable anyway), without posing some kind of logical order on it, is the very basis of why the US convention is a bit daft. By the way, I already speak English (of the Queen's variety), and it seems highly unlikely that the American short-form date notation will ever become the global norm, so I'm not sure what assimilation you're referring to..
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Actually we - that is, the British - often say it that way too, although it is more common to say it as M-D-Y, especially when including the year. But my point is that basing a written, numerical short-form notation purely on natural language (which is variable anyway), without posing some kind of logical order on it, is the very basis of why the US convention is a bit daft. By the way, I already speak English (of the Queen's variety), and it seems highly unlikely that the American short-form date notation will ever become the global norm, so I'm not sure what assimilation you're referring to..
public obj CulturalModification(obj everything) {
Absorb(everything);
obj muchBetterVersion = Modify(everything);
return muchBetterVersion;
}"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
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You seemed to have missed the point. This is CP - we do computer stuff (and some drink Gin). The weights/measures I specified are all powers of 2 - very computer friendly for inter-conversion. On a historical basis, note that you happen to use base ten for that metric trash because you've ten fingers. For a century or two, those more enlightened[^] (i.e., they didn't need to count on their fingers) argued for a switch to base-12 for everything. The reason? 10 has two factors besides itself and one: 2, 5 12 has four factors: 2, 3, 4 and 6 The factors are used in more typical human-friendly transactions 1/2, 1/4, 1/3, for example. So, you guys keep counting on your fingers whilst we embrace our current reality and look to the future!
"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
Base 12 would indeed be better than base 10 for "normal" usage, but you forgot to mention that it's also more directly related to cyclic or sinusoidal measurements. Why? The most common angle measurement factor is 15 degrees e.g. one twenty-fourth of a circle. All of the common fractions of cyclic measurement are multiples of 15 degrees, or twenty-fourths of a circle (or twelfths of a half-circle). But regardless, the metric family of measurement systems is superior not because it uses base 10, but because it uses a COMMON base for all measurements. If that base were 12, and our numbering system were also base 12, it would remain superior to the clapboard mosaic that is the English/Imperial/American "system" of measurement.
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Oh, and Micronesia. At least according to Wikipedia. So why does pretty much every US based service that caters to a worldwide audience use mm/dd/yyyy as a date format Latest example this hour is VS team services "Access issues with Visual Studio Team Services – 5/25 – Investigating". 5/25 = 25 May. That's easy. But when I see 6/7 or 10/8 I have to manually check the site and see what culture they are based in. No one in the US (I'm guessing - apart from ex-pats) worry about this. Or are probably even aware of this issue. Everyone else in every other country is aware of this issue. Everyone in Canada manages to deal with it. And I don't know how their brains don't explode. Canada uses dd/mm/yyyy. Except when it uses mm/dd/yyyy because either it's a US based company, they are using a US based system, they are trying to be nice to their US based customers, because they just forgot to use dd/mm/yyyy or because they know it's me and so they deliberately use an ambiguous date format to do my head in. Date formats in Canada are totally and completely messed up. So: Why, in this day and age, do those in the US, when writing for an international audience, still use mm/dd/yyyy? (And I'll add another one: Why do companies in the US find it impossible to ship outside the US? It's very odd) OK, back to hitting refresh several times a second waiting for Team Services to come back online.
cheers Chris Maunder
I prefer "dd-MMM-yyyy" ("26-May-2016") so that everyone, everywhere understands what you mean. (and before you say "well, everyone who speaks ENGLISH!!..hee hee" Yeah, well, the rest of the page is in English too, ...)
Truth, James
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public obj CulturalModification(obj everything) {
Absorb(everything);
obj muchBetterVersion = Modify(everything);
return muchBetterVersion;
}"The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits." - Albert Einstein
"If you are searching for perfection in others, then you seek disappointment. If you are seek perfection in yourself, then you will find failure." - Balboos HaGadol Mar 2010
So why hasn't the US absorbed the much better date notation that the rest of the world uses?
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I prefer "dd-MMM-yyyy" ("26-May-2016") so that everyone, everywhere understands what you mean. (and before you say "well, everyone who speaks ENGLISH!!..hee hee" Yeah, well, the rest of the page is in English too, ...)
Truth, James
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Oh, and Micronesia. At least according to Wikipedia. So why does pretty much every US based service that caters to a worldwide audience use mm/dd/yyyy as a date format Latest example this hour is VS team services "Access issues with Visual Studio Team Services – 5/25 – Investigating". 5/25 = 25 May. That's easy. But when I see 6/7 or 10/8 I have to manually check the site and see what culture they are based in. No one in the US (I'm guessing - apart from ex-pats) worry about this. Or are probably even aware of this issue. Everyone else in every other country is aware of this issue. Everyone in Canada manages to deal with it. And I don't know how their brains don't explode. Canada uses dd/mm/yyyy. Except when it uses mm/dd/yyyy because either it's a US based company, they are using a US based system, they are trying to be nice to their US based customers, because they just forgot to use dd/mm/yyyy or because they know it's me and so they deliberately use an ambiguous date format to do my head in. Date formats in Canada are totally and completely messed up. So: Why, in this day and age, do those in the US, when writing for an international audience, still use mm/dd/yyyy? (And I'll add another one: Why do companies in the US find it impossible to ship outside the US? It's very odd) OK, back to hitting refresh several times a second waiting for Team Services to come back online.
cheers Chris Maunder
I usually use yyyy-mm-dd, except when my audience can't figure out simple things. Not only is it efficient to sort by date, but, if I am unsure about the date, I leave off the day (yyyy-mm) very simply, and it is clear that I am using yyyy-mm-dd, because no one that I know of would use yyyy-dd-mm, so the format is always clearly understood. Even computers understand it.
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You have a couple similar cases, especially in web stores which use software developed in the US, even though they are European stores: Lots of European countries put the ZIP code ahead of the city name, not after the state name, but the address label print routine insists on doing it "The American Way". In Europe, there is a standard for prefixing the zip with a country code (like NO-7035 Trondheim here in Norway). Lots of web stores will not accept this format. If the web store requires a telephone number, I would follow the international standard of adding a prefix "+" and the country code, like "+47" for Norway - the plus sign indicating "Whatever prefix your national telephone system requires for international calls". Lots of web stores refuse to accept the +. In several web stores, I have to repeat either the city name or the country name, because the software insists on a "State" level inbetween. I have even bought stuff from stores insisting on a non-empty "county" name (in addition to the "state" name). Sure, we do have county names in Norway, but they are never used in addressing! However, my biggest frustration has nothing to do with European vs. US style: I have never, ever, had my credit card number accepted the way it is printed on the card: As four groups of four digits! Every single web shop insist on a single 16-digit sequence, which is far more difficult to verify against your card. It would take the programmer one single one-line function call to remove the spaces from a four-times-four digit enty, but not one of them will do that! Usually, the same applies to telephone numbers: You cannot type them the way you normally do, in space or hyphen separated groups of digits. Maybe one in four will allow spaces/hyphens, serving as a proof that it is possible to remove them programmatically....
I always program my software to accept such normal usages of common numbers. I have never understood why other programmers can't seem to do that.
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Yeah, that's another thing... Why do the Americans drive on the right when most of the world drive, as they should do, on the left?
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
In Mumbai they drive on any part of the road that's free. I may not last forever but the mess I leave behind certainly will.
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Amazing that you're not railing against the focus on Arabic numerals; what about all of those people in the international community that use alternative counting systems? Or other-than-lunar calendars? How, in this day and age, are we overlooking the people that believe that time as it is understood is meaningless, and express the date as "today". :-D Honestly, though, I'm more curious as you why anyone in their right mind would think that dd/mm is better. It has all the same problems, is equally stupid, and is just as reliant on cultural knowledge. If we're going to reformat, I hope it would be to ddMMMyyyy to bludgeon understanding into people (that do believe in time, anyway). In the end, though, I will not have an agenda of changing the common cultural norm (I'm just not that invested) so I'm going to go with the old row: "It ain't broke, so I'm not going to fix it."
"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics." - Benjamin Disraeli
Nathan Minier wrote:
Or other-than-lunar calendars?
Other than? The Western calendar is NOT a lunar calendar. I was working on a project with some Korean people, where they (at least partly) use a real lunar calendar. They count years not by 365.24 days but by 12 full moons. Furthermore, they tell their year by the year you are in: A baby's age is 1 year the first twelve months of his living. As soon as he starts on his second (moon) year of living, his age is two - actually, he turns two a few days before we would say that he turns one! So when I asked the age of one of these Koreans, it had to be calculated: First, correcting from "1 origin" to "0 origin", then multiplying the number of days difference between the moon year and the sun year, and subtract from the moon year age ... This is so long ago that we didn't have smartphone apps to convert it; I guess that today we have it. Disclaimer: This is what a small group of Koreans told me. There may be different subcultures, and today, twenty years later, maybe the Western calender has taken over everything dollar business related. Yet I wouldn't be surprised if the old calendar survives in private activities, like celebrating anniversaries etc.
