Why not an UN resolution for..
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standardizing the date formats and just keep it as one. The shorter, longer, the too longer all these differences are fine. I'm just talking about the completely opposite types like MM-DD-YY DD-MM-YY YY-MM-DD This is seriously freaking tiring to handle. All the data sheet exported from system are in MM-DD-YY format, and the customer read them all as DD-MM-YY & feeds into their own internal system. Yeah I head you saying "This is what localization is supposed to fix". But why? why not we fix this in peoples minds and make them follow a unified type. :sigh: :doh:
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy Falcon.
As Jochen said, ISO 8601 is the standard - and it insists (correctly) on four digit years, not just two. Remember the Millenium Bug problem and the amount of work that caused? Just use
yyyy-MM-ddand it'll be right.Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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As Jochen said, ISO 8601 is the standard - and it insists (correctly) on four digit years, not just two. Remember the Millenium Bug problem and the amount of work that caused? Just use
yyyy-MM-ddand it'll be right.Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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As Jochen said, ISO 8601 is the standard - and it insists (correctly) on four digit years, not just two. Remember the Millenium Bug problem and the amount of work that caused? Just use
yyyy-MM-ddand it'll be right.Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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As Jochen said, ISO 8601 is the standard - and it insists (correctly) on four digit years, not just two. Remember the Millenium Bug problem and the amount of work that caused? Just use
yyyy-MM-ddand it'll be right.Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
YYYY-MM-DD is great for historical context but not so great for day-to-day. When you read a date, what is the most important portion of that date to you? As someone who natively reads a left-to-right language, I believe the most critical portions should be farthest left. I know, currently, it's Tuesday where I live. Maybe I've been super busy for two weeks and missed that May rolled over into June. For me the most important portion is the month. With that single value alone I can immediately orient myself in time - Tuesday, early June, 2018. Viewing only the year, or only the day, can you claim the same? EDIT: I'm honestly curious (open discussion to anyone). I'm not set on any given methodology; this one just makes more sense to me. Anytime I bring up my reasoning in other discussions I'm dismissed as an American yet they provide no sensible argument to the contrary.
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OriginalGriff wrote:
Remember the Millenium Bug problem and the amount of work that caused profiteering that that enabled?
98.4% of statistics are made up on the spot.
Some of it was profiteering, yes - but a lot was behind the scenes and wasn't. I spent a lot of time, effort, (and money) in late 90's making sure that all the systems in company I had just joined as Technical Manager (i.e. responsible for everything more complicated than a mains plug) were going to work on Jan 1st 2000, and replacing those that wouldn't. And that meant exhaustive testing on the Unix box that ran the company accounts (Accounts software: fail. Accounts system OS: fail. Accounts system hardware: Oh :Elephant:, Oh :Elephant:, Oh :Elephant:, fail, fail, fail. Can I get it back up by Monday?) followed by new software selection, implementation, data transfer, training, and parallel running as well as new software to produce management accounts summaries in a format they could understand. The reason very little failed on Jan 1 worldwide was that a huge amount of effort went into making sure they wouldn't ... :laugh:
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Some of it was profiteering, yes - but a lot was behind the scenes and wasn't. I spent a lot of time, effort, (and money) in late 90's making sure that all the systems in company I had just joined as Technical Manager (i.e. responsible for everything more complicated than a mains plug) were going to work on Jan 1st 2000, and replacing those that wouldn't. And that meant exhaustive testing on the Unix box that ran the company accounts (Accounts software: fail. Accounts system OS: fail. Accounts system hardware: Oh :Elephant:, Oh :Elephant:, Oh :Elephant:, fail, fail, fail. Can I get it back up by Monday?) followed by new software selection, implementation, data transfer, training, and parallel running as well as new software to produce management accounts summaries in a format they could understand. The reason very little failed on Jan 1 worldwide was that a huge amount of effort went into making sure they wouldn't ... :laugh:
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
It was a fair bit of both, in truth. Yes, there was an awful lot of genuine work involved but equally there were an awful lot of "consultants" lining their pockets by spreading the fear. For my part, I did very well out of it working on a project for a very large organisation to temporarily migrate their ERP system for the two years across the millennium because SAP were reluctant to guarantee millennium compliance. Was that money well spent? I rather suspect that any problems arising from not doing it could have been sorted out by a bit of overtime for the finance team. Either way, I was rather glad that developers of yore were so short-sighted and/or strapped for disk-space!
98.4% of statistics are made up on the spot.
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Richard MacCutchan wrote:
Because the 'mercans cannot handle...
Careful now. Most of the things they can't handle are the side effects of having been British colonies. Centuries of independence have not even helped very much. The only thing they were spared was not having to drive on the weirder side of the road. :-)
I have lived with several Zen masters - all of them were cats. His last invention was an evil Lasagna. It didn't kill anyone, and it actually tasted pretty good.
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YYYY-MM-DD is great for historical context but not so great for day-to-day. When you read a date, what is the most important portion of that date to you? As someone who natively reads a left-to-right language, I believe the most critical portions should be farthest left. I know, currently, it's Tuesday where I live. Maybe I've been super busy for two weeks and missed that May rolled over into June. For me the most important portion is the month. With that single value alone I can immediately orient myself in time - Tuesday, early June, 2018. Viewing only the year, or only the day, can you claim the same? EDIT: I'm honestly curious (open discussion to anyone). I'm not set on any given methodology; this one just makes more sense to me. Anytime I bring up my reasoning in other discussions I'm dismissed as an American yet they provide no sensible argument to the contrary.
Treat dates likes numbers: The most important parts are the higher digits. Treat dates like times: The most important part is the hour. The ISO 8601 format is logical (always a good argument for scientists, engineers, programmers etc) and has not been used before by any culture (avoiding the discussion about which of the existing formats is the best).
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Treat dates likes numbers: The most important parts are the higher digits. Treat dates like times: The most important part is the hour. The ISO 8601 format is logical (always a good argument for scientists, engineers, programmers etc) and has not been used before by any culture (avoiding the discussion about which of the existing formats is the best).
I've heard and understood that logic in the past - it makes a lot of sense from a purely logical point of view. The huge fallacy with this is that humans aren't machines. Generally speaking we remember things in relative terms. You don't remember easily what you did on 29/5/2018 but if I said Tuesday two weeks ago you'd immediately recollect. This is my entire point (which may be cultural I admit). I remember what I did on a relative day of the week (Mon-Sun) and relative to the month (week 1-4). If you asked me what I was doing 3 weeks ago on a Monday I could immediately tell you. If you asked me what I was doing on 21/5 I wouldn't have a clue. This is exacerbated by the fact months have differing numbers of days on top of leap years being a thing. This relativism lends itself to the month being the most important factor since it is the "anchor" by which you relate the weeks and days (Mon-Sun). EDIT: Another way to look at it. You have five criteria for determining absolute date: relative day, relative week, day, month, year. Year is obvious so let's exclude it. I can determine the exact date from relative day, relative week, and month (no need for day). Relative day is universally known - you know whether it's Monday or Friday. Relative week is a bit sketchier but the alternative is absolute day. I would argue more people at least have an idea about the former, but can you tell me the relative day and week of the latter without looking at a calendar?
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YYYY-MM-DD is great for historical context but not so great for day-to-day. When you read a date, what is the most important portion of that date to you? As someone who natively reads a left-to-right language, I believe the most critical portions should be farthest left. I know, currently, it's Tuesday where I live. Maybe I've been super busy for two weeks and missed that May rolled over into June. For me the most important portion is the month. With that single value alone I can immediately orient myself in time - Tuesday, early June, 2018. Viewing only the year, or only the day, can you claim the same? EDIT: I'm honestly curious (open discussion to anyone). I'm not set on any given methodology; this one just makes more sense to me. Anytime I bring up my reasoning in other discussions I'm dismissed as an American yet they provide no sensible argument to the contrary.
You get used to yyyyMMdd. this is often what gets spat out of systems like SAP in text files. It's consistency. I like it as it is readily sortable when held as a string (Not that we should, but it does happen). In particular if I have a bunch of folders, putting yyyyMMdd enables them to be sorted. Trying to find notes embedded in a list of folders formatted either of the other two ways is difficult. Also, the Japanese use yyyy/MM/dd as their standard format - I am in Japan right now, so I see it all the time. I have it in mind that South Africa does as well.
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You get used to yyyyMMdd. this is often what gets spat out of systems like SAP in text files. It's consistency. I like it as it is readily sortable when held as a string (Not that we should, but it does happen). In particular if I have a bunch of folders, putting yyyyMMdd enables them to be sorted. Trying to find notes embedded in a list of folders formatted either of the other two ways is difficult. Also, the Japanese use yyyy/MM/dd as their standard format - I am in Japan right now, so I see it all the time. I have it in mind that South Africa does as well.
おはようございます. IIRC it must be super early for you. My argument doesn't stem from common practices but what makes sense from how humans interpret time. YYYY-MM-DD is great for historical records or things intended to indicate an exact point of time over a long period of time (> 1 year). But people don't remember Monday as 11/6 and today as 12/6. They remember Monday as Monday and Tuesday as Tuesday. This relativism lends itself against pure logic as I mentioned in my other post.[^]
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I've heard and understood that logic in the past - it makes a lot of sense from a purely logical point of view. The huge fallacy with this is that humans aren't machines. Generally speaking we remember things in relative terms. You don't remember easily what you did on 29/5/2018 but if I said Tuesday two weeks ago you'd immediately recollect. This is my entire point (which may be cultural I admit). I remember what I did on a relative day of the week (Mon-Sun) and relative to the month (week 1-4). If you asked me what I was doing 3 weeks ago on a Monday I could immediately tell you. If you asked me what I was doing on 21/5 I wouldn't have a clue. This is exacerbated by the fact months have differing numbers of days on top of leap years being a thing. This relativism lends itself to the month being the most important factor since it is the "anchor" by which you relate the weeks and days (Mon-Sun). EDIT: Another way to look at it. You have five criteria for determining absolute date: relative day, relative week, day, month, year. Year is obvious so let's exclude it. I can determine the exact date from relative day, relative week, and month (no need for day). Relative day is universally known - you know whether it's Monday or Friday. Relative week is a bit sketchier but the alternative is absolute day. I would argue more people at least have an idea about the former, but can you tell me the relative day and week of the latter without looking at a calendar?
You do realise that you are talking about time spans now? Sorry for being pedantic here. I see your point but being an engineer and developer I have switched to the standardised formats long time ago even in "real" life (e.g. when signing papers requiring also the date). If you want to target users from all over the world, you have to use a general format understood by (hopefully) all of them. Everybody has to use something new from time to time. I'm not an American but understanding the ISO date format should be no problem compared with the changings to the metric system. As a developer you are free to provide such data in any or multiple formats. An example might be the posting dates here at CodeProject which are provided as time spans for short periods (hours ago, yesterday) and the date for older posts.
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YYYY-MM-DD is great for historical context but not so great for day-to-day. When you read a date, what is the most important portion of that date to you? As someone who natively reads a left-to-right language, I believe the most critical portions should be farthest left. I know, currently, it's Tuesday where I live. Maybe I've been super busy for two weeks and missed that May rolled over into June. For me the most important portion is the month. With that single value alone I can immediately orient myself in time - Tuesday, early June, 2018. Viewing only the year, or only the day, can you claim the same? EDIT: I'm honestly curious (open discussion to anyone). I'm not set on any given methodology; this one just makes more sense to me. Anytime I bring up my reasoning in other discussions I'm dismissed as an American yet they provide no sensible argument to the contrary.
The most important part is the day. If you have an appointment on the 13th, then you need to know that it is tomorrow. If you think I have an appointment in June then you will likely miss it.
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You do realise that you are talking about time spans now? Sorry for being pedantic here. I see your point but being an engineer and developer I have switched to the standardised formats long time ago even in "real" life (e.g. when signing papers requiring also the date). If you want to target users from all over the world, you have to use a general format understood by (hopefully) all of them. Everybody has to use something new from time to time. I'm not an American but understanding the ISO date format should be no problem compared with the changings to the metric system. As a developer you are free to provide such data in any or multiple formats. An example might be the posting dates here at CodeProject which are provided as time spans for short periods (hours ago, yesterday) and the date for older posts.
Dates themselves are no more than a span of time relative to your current. The bigger question is who these time spans are important to. If it's a computer than UNIX time is superior to any of the aforementioned formats. If it's a human then you need to account for human ways in which they judge and measure the format. My argument is precisely that. It's slightly a goal-post move but to hit on the ISO mention: just because something exists doesn't inherently mean it's right. EDIT: Off-topic but it's worth mentioning that even though I use the Imperial System for measurement (you have to in the US), I actually vehemently agree with the Metric System being more reasonable.
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The most important part is the day. If you have an appointment on the 13th, then you need to know that it is tomorrow. If you think I have an appointment in June then you will likely miss it.
If I have an appointment on the next Wednesday I don't need to know the absolute day, month, or year. It's tomorrow. EDIT: Actually in this specific case I see where you're coming from in that if you have an appointment in the future for, say 26/10, the day is important. But at the same time, a month is restricted by 12, a day by anywhere from 28-31. Wouldn't you rather know Wednesday in October (4 options) vs the 26th 4th week (12 options)?
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Some of it was profiteering, yes - but a lot was behind the scenes and wasn't. I spent a lot of time, effort, (and money) in late 90's making sure that all the systems in company I had just joined as Technical Manager (i.e. responsible for everything more complicated than a mains plug) were going to work on Jan 1st 2000, and replacing those that wouldn't. And that meant exhaustive testing on the Unix box that ran the company accounts (Accounts software: fail. Accounts system OS: fail. Accounts system hardware: Oh :Elephant:, Oh :Elephant:, Oh :Elephant:, fail, fail, fail. Can I get it back up by Monday?) followed by new software selection, implementation, data transfer, training, and parallel running as well as new software to produce management accounts summaries in a format they could understand. The reason very little failed on Jan 1 worldwide was that a huge amount of effort went into making sure they wouldn't ... :laugh:
Sent from my Amstrad PC 1640 Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay... AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
I also ended up correcting a fair number of serious bugs in my company's software related to this issue. Regrettably, no profiteering on my part, since I was salary. Maybe next time, in the unlikely event its still necessary, when the original 32 bit Unix clock runs out in 2038 :)
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standardizing the date formats and just keep it as one. The shorter, longer, the too longer all these differences are fine. I'm just talking about the completely opposite types like MM-DD-YY DD-MM-YY YY-MM-DD This is seriously freaking tiring to handle. All the data sheet exported from system are in MM-DD-YY format, and the customer read them all as DD-MM-YY & feeds into their own internal system. Yeah I head you saying "This is what localization is supposed to fix". But why? why not we fix this in peoples minds and make them follow a unified type. :sigh: :doh:
Starting to think people post kid pics in their profiles because that was the last time they were cute - Jeremy Falcon.
The best convention is the number of seconds elapsed since 01.04.1972 : sssssssssssssssssssssssssss. No problem by export / import.
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Careful - the euro-standard is just uniformly ass-backwards. D-M-Y (any number of digits you prefer) sorts totally wrong. Period. YYYYMMDD is the only rational format as it can be sorted as is, even as text - but can be stored/sorted as an int. (I leave off proper date objects as they'd sort regardless). Just the usual Eurogance (the now and forever word for European arrogance). Time you just get over yourselves. Get some laxatives - clear your thoughts.
"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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Careful - the euro-standard is just uniformly ass-backwards. D-M-Y (any number of digits you prefer) sorts totally wrong. Period. YYYYMMDD is the only rational format as it can be sorted as is, even as text - but can be stored/sorted as an int. (I leave off proper date objects as they'd sort regardless). Just the usual Eurogance (the now and forever word for European arrogance). Time you just get over yourselves. Get some laxatives - clear your thoughts.
"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:
Careful - the euro-standard is just uniformly ass-backwards.
The Euro-standard sorts perfectly - if you write from right to left. :) You guys just need to learn Hebrew!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.
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It was a fair bit of both, in truth. Yes, there was an awful lot of genuine work involved but equally there were an awful lot of "consultants" lining their pockets by spreading the fear. For my part, I did very well out of it working on a project for a very large organisation to temporarily migrate their ERP system for the two years across the millennium because SAP were reluctant to guarantee millennium compliance. Was that money well spent? I rather suspect that any problems arising from not doing it could have been sorted out by a bit of overtime for the finance team. Either way, I was rather glad that developers of yore were so short-sighted and/or strapped for disk-space!
98.4% of statistics are made up on the spot.
I am surprised because SAP was touted as the solution to the Y2K problem in the US and was bought by many customers.
