Date format

[Mr.Nobody]

European format:dd/mm/yyyy 11/9/2001
North American format: mm/dd/yyyy 9/11/2001

How do you usually say it in Europ and north America respectively? 11th of September 2001 or September 11th 2001?



EDIT:
This triviality has been causing numerous troubles, especially in the field of E-mail exchanges among international corporations, really annoying...

In China/Japan, we use yyyy/mm/dd format in both written and spoken language which is not only traditional but also consistent and more logical, and it happens to be compliant with ISO8601( a commandatory international standard applied when important documents need to be signed)

[002]

Here we say it as it's written (dd/MM/yyyy) but we add 'of' between day and month generally:
11th *of* September, 2001

yyyy/MM/dd is preferred for anything involving computers / programming I'd say because it can be sorted without fuck-arsing around. It would be stupid to speak the date like that though. If someone asks you what the date is and you give them the year first (or even at all) you will be viewed as a dipshit. Even giving the month is superfluous in most cases.

[vivalarevolución]

We do it how we want. Because America.

[002]

I guess you guys have some arbitrary charming folktale about why it's said that way.

[vivalarevolución]

I guess you guys have some arbitrary charming folktale about why it's said that way.

Let me tell you about how it all started back all back when the Whig Party was a major player in the political scene and.....I wish. I think we just write the date that way because it's how we say it.

Personally, I much prefer the European style of dates, time, weights and measures. I use 24-hour clocks on my electronic devices when I can, write the date out like 28 February 2017, and wish we would just start using the metric system already because it actually makes sense.

But honestly I think we do it this way because of custom and, well, the idea of American exceptionalism. We just have to be different.

[fohat]

When speaking to humans I use the American style that I have used all my life, but many years ago I realized that for computer information you make it 1000x easier to go yyyymmdd so that today is 20170228 - and never leave off any zeros!

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Maybe it's because I'm a product of my age, but I've never settled on anything — I'm wedged somewhere in between Imperial and metric, and US, European and now Asian date formats. I have my PC set to Y-M-D format for no particular reason, but I still find D/M/Y more logical, but verbally I tend towards the US way of treating dates, and fight against this when writing them down.

A year or two back, there was an installation bug in MySQL for Windows because they were letting the computer handle date processing from configuration files according to local culture. The installer would read dates from the installation package in US format, try to process them in UK format and crash. You had to switch the entire computer back to US culture any time you wanted to deal with the installer.

That's not the worst offence either — at least one technical standard format goes something like M D H:M Y, which is absurd.

Sadly you can't write out CSV in Y-M-D and expect Excel to recognise it: Excel only recognises locale-specific date formats, which ensures ambiguity. I never realised this as use Y-M-D in CSV generation and use that as my system short date format, but on any other PC, Excel has no idea it's looking at dates. Then again, Excel pretends it doesn't have a locale-safe date+time format. It does, and you can select it when generating a spreadsheet programmatically (which is what I'm doing now) but from the UI, a field can only be date or time but never both. You can manually configure a format, but then it loses its locale independence. Programmatically choosing the secret date+time format does yield cells that show Y-M-D H:M under my login and D/M/Y H:M under other logins still in normal UK format. (I have no idea where these formats are documented by Microsoft; the codes are helpfully laid out in the documentation for the superb Perl module I'm using. Another thing you can't obtain is the font metrics for Calibri, so I've estimated them for the basic characters using Inkscape so that I can calculate column width requirements ± Windows's consistently appalling font rendering.)

[Chyros]

I guess you guys have some arbitrary charming folktale about why it's said that way.

Let me tell you about how it all started back all back when the Whig Party was a major player in the political scene and.....I wish. I think we just write the date that way because it's how we say it.

Personally, I much prefer the European style of dates, time, weights and measures. I use 24-hour clocks on my electronic devices when I can, write the date out like 28 February 2017, and wish we would just start using the metric system already because it actually makes sense.

But honestly I think we do it this way because of custom and, well, the idea of American exceptionalism. We just have to be different.

"Different" :p .

[Engicoder]

I don't know where it started, but the earliest document of the USA (aka. "America"), the Declaration of Independence begins with the line "In Congress July 4, 1776", so it's been with us for a while and is carried over from when Americans were British subjects.

[andrewjoy]

One way is big-endian thats best for computers
one way is little-endian thats best for human readable

who the fuck had ever heared of middle-endian, thats just stupid.

[Norman_]

[Mr.Nobody]

Computers can run because programs are installed, programs run because the logic in code is correct, so logic matters at least in the world of computers; I think that's why YYYY/MM/DD format is adopted and promoted by computer geeks, all in all, from generic to specific is a logical way of sorting things up right?

The American exceptionalism reminds me of the videos on youtube about how to spell and pronounce this word:
Aluminum(US) vs. Aluminium(UK)
Maybe one day, American folks don't have to speak English anymore, they will speak American.

[alh84001]

I don't like ISO format when dealing with humans because it takes names of months out of the equation. Days and years are numeric, but month names are often tied to folklore and history. In my language, officially you would say "25. lipnja 2017.", where "lipnja" is genitive of "lipa" which means linden/lime. That would translate to June 25th, 2017. But more often than not, people actually just say the ordinal number of the month, so it would become "25. 6. 2017." Dot's are important there.

[vivalarevolución]

I don't like ISO format when dealing with humans because it takes names of months out of the equation. Days and years are numeric, but month names are often tied to folklore and history. In my language, officially you would say "25. lipnja 2017.", where "lipnja" is genitive of "lipa" which means linden/lime. That would translate to June 25th, 2017. But more often than not, people actually just say the ordinal number of the month, so it would become "25. 6. 2017." Dot's are important there.

We are all living in a computer simulation, anyways, does folklore and history really matter anymore?

[alh84001]

If it's simulated, it doesn't mean it's less real (to us)

[Mr.Nobody]

Quote:
On September 23, 1999 NASA lost the $125 million Mars Climate
Orbiter spacecraft after a 286-day journey to Mars. Miscalculations due to the use
of English units instead of metric units apparently sent the craft slowly off course -
- 60 miles in all. Thrusters used to help point the spacecraft had, over the course
of months, been fired incorrectly because data used to control the wheels were
calculated in incorrect units. Lockheed Martin, which was performing the
calculations, was sending thruster data in English units (pounds) to NASA, while
NASA's navigation team was expecting metric units (Newtons).
End of quote

Speechless, so called rocket science...

*** ***
On 23 July 1983, Air Canada Flight 143 ran completely out of fuel
about halfway through its flight from Montreal to Edmonton. Fuel loading was
miscalculated through misunderstanding of the recently adopted metric system.
For the trip, the pilot calculated a fuel requirement of 22,300 kilograms.
But the ground crew only pumped 22,300 pounds into the tanks...

Here is the documentary by National Geographic

The pilot is a hero and gambler...

[Daniel Beardsmore]

The American exceptionalism reminds me of the videos on youtube about how to spell and pronounce this word:
Aluminum(US) vs. Aluminium(UK)

"Aluminum" is also a British spelling (the element's name changed several times before it settled). So is "burglarize". And "railroad". And "color" — the British tried to sound more French, and the US kept the old Latin-derived spelling. The divergence in language is far more complex than the tired old argument that Americans changed all the spellings. Even -ze is British; we changed -ze to -se.

Curiously, the Macintosh is one of the few systems (at least, I guess there's another somewhere) in which a slash can be used in filenames, meaning that you can store dates in human form in filenames. (IIRC since OS X, slash in the Macintosh layer is replaced with some other character in the UNIX layer (colon maybe) — UNIX allows colons in names, which PCs and Macs never did — drive separator in DOS and path separator in classic Mac OS.)

[lancre]

There was an interesting discussion about the difficulty that exists with dates and different date systems in Joe Celko's book SQL for Smarties - and some interesting historical observations - for example, the 11 days that were skipped in 1752, and Sept, Oct, Nov being 7, 8, 9 even though they are names for the 9th, 10th and 11th month - because until 1752 the year began on the 25th of March.

[andrewjoy]

We are all living in a computer simulation, anyways, does folklore and history really matter anymore?

Thats not possible no programmer would be stupid enough to come up with the retarded american date format . Well unless he was a visual basic programmer .

[vivalarevolución]

We are all living in a computer simulation, anyways, does folklore and history really matter anymore?

Thats not possible no programmer would be stupid enough to come up with the retarded american date format . Well unless he was a visual basic programmer .

I think the simulation allows for some variations. Just think about this, though: if the universe exists without the hand of some operators and just randomly exists, then why are all the "mysteries of the universe" eventually explained with mathematics and physics? Seems like the design of the universe isn't such a mystery....

[Findecanor]

ISO dates should be written with dashes and no other separators. The use of dashes is how you can spot that it is an ISO date and not something archaic.
2017-03-02 "two-thousand-seventeen o-three o-two"

The domestic date format that I have been taught in Sweden is "little-endian" with a slash only between day-of-month and month, with a space between those and the year. Only a two-digit year can have a leading zero.
2/3 17 "second of third, seventeen"

On computers, I always use a count of seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00 UTC internally in programs and databases. Then that is converted to/from different time zones and formats.
1488462655.

BTW, ISO time formatting is HH:MM:SS but Swedish time formatting has a period between hours and minutes.
Swedish time formatting is on the decline, however, and sometimes even Swedish web forms do not accept that format - which they should!.

[alh84001]

On computers, I use seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00 UTC: 1488462655.

People should be taught this in primary school, so that when they see, for instance 2488462655, they have an inkling how far in the future that is.

[Findecanor]

Sadly you can't write out CSV in Y-M-D and expect Excel to recognise it: Excel only recognises locale-specific date formats, which ensures ambiguity.

Oh, I'm tired of locale retardiness.. People who wrote that stuff apparently never used more than one language in their system at once.
I have my machine set to "Swedish", "English (UK)" and "English (US)" in that order, so that if a program has Swedish localisation then that is used; otherwise it is a form of English.
However.. locale is not handled in groups. So if a program does not support Swedish then the text will be in English but it will still require numbers to be entered in Swedish locale which uses decimal comma instead of decimal point - and that gets really annoying at times.
The only way to fix this would be to wrap every English-language program in a script that changes the locale settings per program... Maybe I could hack the C library but I don't think that would be fool-proof.

[andrewjoy]

On computers, I use seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00 UTC: 1488462655.

People should be taught this in primary school, so that when they see, for instance 2488462655, they have an inkling how far in the future that is.

Wait ! that date is no possible !

Time ends on 2147483647

[alh84001]

you mean, simulation stops

[andrewjoy]

the simulation is 32 bit

[Daniel Beardsmore]

That explains 7bit's group buys .....

[Rimrul]

On computers, I use seconds since 1970-01-01 00:00 UTC: 1488462655.

People should be taught this in primary school, so that when they see, for instance 2488462655, they have an inkling how far in the future that is.

Wait ! that date is no possible !

Time ends on 2147483647

And that's where both of you are wrong. Time doesn't end, it rolls over to -2147483648.

[Engicoder]

One way is big-endian thats best for computers
one way is little-endian thats best for human readable

who the fuck had ever heared of middle-endian, thats just stupid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endianness#Middle-endian

[Mr.Nobody]

I think the simulation allows for some variations. Just think about this, though: if the universe exists without the hand of some operators and just randomly exists, then why are all the "mysteries of the universe" eventually explained with mathematics and physics? Seems like the design of the universe isn't such a mystery....

Exactly...if only the simulation theory thread wasn't ruined by some people...it's apparent that many people are still interested in the topic, so check this vid out,I really love the Game of Life part and the VR part and the closing speech of the video maker.