It warms my heart to see so many comments in the camp of “I use it everywhere”. Absolutely same here. You are my people.
Together with hh:mm(:ss) for times and +hh:mm for timezones. Don’t make me deal with that 12am/pm bullshit that doesn’t make any sense, and don’t make make me look up just what the time difference is between CEST and IST. Just give me the offsets +02:00 and +05:30, and I can calculate that my local time of 06:55+03:30=10:25 in India.
You never know when something might need to become a filename, so you might as well just use ISO 8601 for everything.
better than the absolutely deranged MM/DD/YYYY and imo the best when it comes to international communication
I’ve been told " You don’t say 6th June, do you?" too many times
In the U.K. we do all the same. Sixth of June.
In the US it’s about 50/50 sixth of June and June sixth.
The amusing thing is that in Swedish you definitely do. Or actually “6:e juni”.
Germany too
Even Americans does as well: “4th of July”.
How the fuck does second largest to smallest to largest make any kind of sense?
To the commenters justifying the written form MM-DD-YYYY on the basis of preferring to say the name of the month followed by the day (which the written numerical sequence does not preclude you from doing). If someone were to say something like “the time is a quarter to eleven” do you think they would have a case for writing it 45:10? And if so, how would you deal with the ambiguity of “ten past ten” if they wrote it 10:10 instead of 10:10?
This guy’s throwing wrenches into engines
Excuse me?! ISO 8601 >> *
ISO dates are the goat because they string compare correctly. Just yesterday I shaved 2 full seconds off a page transition by removing a date parse in the middle of a hot sorting loop. Everything should use ISO in my opinion.
Maybe we should form some sort of organization, on an international stage, dedicated to creating and maintaining such standards.
Can’t believe he missed the opportunity to add 41332 to the number of ways of how not to write dates.
I must be missing something.
Experience with excel.
I feel better that I don’t understand now.
They’re trying to make it look fake!
I recall writing a script that produces that 01237 with smaller digits around it for the current date. It lists the numbers that occur in the date (0, 2, 3 and 9 for 2023-09-09), the smaller digits show at which position they show up in a YYYYMMDD format (the 0 shows up on positions 2, 5 and 7)
The script has not been pushed online cause it was so dang bad
10 Aug 2023 is the superior format for handwritten dates, no misinterpretation of the date itself or an improperly written divider.
ISO-8601 over all other formats. 2023-08-09T21:11:00Z
Simple, sortable, intuitive.
Awful to actually read, though. Using T as a delimiter is mental… At least the hyphen provides some white space
Honestly, even a lowercase t.
Using T as a delimiter is mental
You get used to it.
Why are you splitting and delimiting a date object? Convert it to a shallower object if that’s what you need
While you are definitely right, I and many others use yyyy-mm-dd outside of software. And that’s when the T becomes super lame.
Good luck using colons in a filename.
Linux has been able to handle that since the 90s.
Tough luck if you are using NTFS file system. All my homies use EXT4.
btrfs/zfs > ext4
Christ, do this many people really find iso8601 hard to read? It’s the date and the time with a T in the middle.
I think it’s fair that programmatic and human readable can be different. If someone is putting in the month word for a logging system they can fuck right off though
If someone is putting in the month word for a logging system they can fuck right off though
That way you can sort the months of the year, in order:
- April
- August
- December
- February
- January
- July
- June
- March
- May
- November
- September
Not “many people.” Americans. Americans find it hard to read. I’m not 100% sure but I’m fairly certain everyone else in the world agrees that either day/month/year or year/month/day is the best way to clearly indicate a date. You know, because big to small. America believes month/day/year for some stupid fucking reason.
I’m pretty sure it’s because of the way we say it. Like, “May 6th, 2023”. So we write it 5/6/2023.
That said, I think it’s fucking stupid.
I’m not an American and English isn’t my first language, so the US way to write dates always confused me. Now, I finally understand it! Many thanks, this is legitimately sooooo useful!
Day/month/year is not in the same category as y/m/d. That crap is so ambiguous. Is today August 9th? Or September 8th? Y/m/d to the rescue.
As long as they use letter for months, like Jul 09, 2013 its fine. Otherwise prefer a sorted timescale version. Either slow changing to fast changing yyyy mm dd or fast to slow dd mm yyyy.
The letters make no sense to me. Like Jul, Jun, I’m constantly mixing them up. Give me a good solid number like 07 or 10. No mixing that up. Higher numbers come after lower numbers, simple as.
I really wonder how americans were able to fuck this one up. There are three ways to arrange these and two of them are acceptable!
Edit: Yes, I meant common ways, not combinatorically possible ways.
Hmmm more like 6 ways but I get your point
Twelve ways if you count two-digit years. My nephew was born on 12/12/12 which was convenient.
for the americans, that’s 12/12/12
Thanks bro, I was really confused
Three ways that people actually use. YYYY-MM-DD, DD-MM-YYYY, and MM-DD-YYYY (ew).
AFAIK no-one does YYYY-DD-MM, DD-YYYY-MM, or MM-YYYY-DD… yet. Don’t let the Americans know about these formats, they might just start using them out of spite.
Need more julian dates, YYYY-JJJ.
What, 2023-223 for the 223rd day of the year 2023? That… is oddly appealing for telling the actual progress of the year or grouping. No silly “does this group have 31, 30, 29 or 28 members”, particularly the “is this year a multiple of four, but not of 100, unless it’s also a multiple of 400?” bit with leap days.
You’ll have oddities still, no matter which way you slice it, because our orbit is mathematically imperfect, but it’s a start.
So we need to correct our orbit is what I’m hearing!
That’d be a wack premise for a crazy scientist story
It’s how the dates are typically said, here. November 6th, 2020 = 11/6/2020. [Edit: I had written 9 instead of 11 for November.] (We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.) It’s easy to use, but I agree that YYYY-MM-DD is vastly superior for organization.
It is a bit of a chicken and egg question though. Because do Americans not say it that way because of the date format or is that the date format because you don’t say it that way?
Because in countries using DD.MM.YY we absolutely do say 6th of November.
That’s probably what happened. Though I do like starting with the larger context when talking about dates, but omitting it when talking about the current month or year.
We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.
When is your independence day, again?
Anyway, in Australia (and, I suspect, other places that use DD/MM/YYYY) we use “{ordinal} of {month}” (11th of August), “{ordinal} {month}” (11th August), and “{month} {ordinal}” (August 11th) pretty much interchangeably. In writing but not in speaking, we also sometimes use “{number} {month}” (11 August). That doesn’t have any bearing on how we write it short form though, because those are different things. It’s not the defence many Americans seem to think it is of their insane method of writing the short form.
When is your independence day, again?
July 4th, why?
It’s not the defence many Americans seem to think it is of their insane method of writing the short form.
I’ve never once been confused about a written date whilst in the US. Your country’s other-side-of-the-Earth flip-floppery on how it uses dates really doesn’t (and shouldn’t) impact our system, which we continue to use because it has proven effective and easy. Trying to stagnate an evolving culture/language is pointless and about as futile as trying to force a river to run backwards. If people start jumbling up how we do it here, like you say Australia does, then that will be right, too.
Saying it like that is no problem and not ambiguous. Writing it like that makes no sense though.
Where is here that November = 9? Probably somewhere you’ve had a long day
Oct = 8
Nov = 9
Dec = 10In metric time there are only 10 months per year
Do people outside of the US not say dates like “June first” etc? M/D/Y matches that. It’s really not weird at all, even if the international ambiguity is awful.
Flemish here (aka dutch-speaking). We say first June, sixth November etc. English isn’t our native language, so M/D/Y is weird as fuck and completely illogical to us.
Yes it is objectively weird.
When you write down “07/01/1967” are you unaware that it is unclear whether you’re referring to July 1st or January 7th?
And despite the fact that you’re writing something down for the express purpose of communicating information, and you’re choosing to shorten it’s written format to save time and space, you’re ok with either
a) just leaving it ambiguous and communicating poorly
or
b) having to write extra words to give it context, taking up more space than just writing out “July 1st, 1967”?
1967/06/01 clearly communicates we’re starting with the year and going biggest to smallest time increments. There is no ambiguity as to which order it’s ever in, and it’s far shorter than the full written date.
At a fundamental user experience level, it is objectively nonsensical to choose the American date format when your goals are 1) clearly communicating a date and 2) doing it shorter than writing out the words.
I like to do YYDDMM because I’m a monster.
It’s not unclear to americans. “Objectively” is hilarious here. If it’s in the format people expect, then it’s perfectly fine in context. Sorry that US traditions don’t suit your fancy.
It’s definitely confusing in an international context, but well-estsblished conventions don’t change easily.
It’s not unclear to americans. “Objectively” is hilarious here. If it’s in the format people expect, then it’s perfectly fine in context. Sorry that US traditions don’t suit your fancy.
Yes, if you chose the objectively wrong way of doing something and then tell everyone that you’re always going to do it the wrong way, then yes, people will expect you to do it the dumb way. Congratulations. That’s how choosing a protocol works. That doesn’t mean that some protocols aren’t objectively worse than others.
It’s hilarious that you think “objective” is hilarious, given that you’re reasoning is based 100% on the subjective experiences of Americans.
That’s how formats work, I hate to break it to you. The ambiguity sucks, but the format itself makes perfect sense given the way americans say dates.
The ambiguity sucks, but the format itself makes perfect sense given the way americans say dates.
We all say dates the same.
It’s objectively dumb because it’s the format that results in ambiguity. Again, the point that it’s good cause Americans are familiar with it is a subjective criteria, since it only applies to American’s experience with using it, whereas the ambiguity of an out of order time span is an objective one.
Only the combination of formats results in ambiguity. Neither format is ambiguous on its own.
Standardization is good, and if someone were to change it should probably be the US given the apparent worldwide consensus otherwise. That doesn’t make either format good or bad on its own.
What I take issue with is people acting like the US format is some kind of bizarro nonsense when it in fact makes perfect sense in terms of matching spoken dates. That is hardly a weird basis for a format.
Each has its tradeoffs, and which set of tradeoffs is better is a subjective matter. I agree that d/m/y makes the most sense for an international standard (if not y/m/d), but to claim that the US format itself is somehow objectively bad is silly.
In Danish, it’s said like 1st of June.
In Germany we say things like “we meet on the twelfth fifth” (Zwölfter Fünfter), which is the twelfth day of the fifth month. Often times the year is also shortened to only the last two digits, so it could be twelfth fifth twenty-four in dd-mm-yy format.
Of course we also use the names of the months, but sometimes we just number them.
Year-Month-Day best everywhere
There are two ways of writting dates: the “yyyy-mm-dd” one and the wrong one
ISO 8601 ftw. Here’s the date, time, and duration for our next meeting:
2023-08-10T20:00:00PT2H30M
But where is a timezone?
Timezone is optional, and when missing is read as local time.
In my mind, default is UTC unless otherwise specified.
luckily Local time can be any timezone!
PT, Pacific time. /s
nearly forgot that 8601 has support for durations as well
It handles ambiguity too. Want to say something lasts for a period of 1 month without needing to bother checking how many days are in the current and next month?
P1M
. Done. Want to be more explicit and say 30 days?P30D
. Want to say it in hours? Add theT
separator:PT720H
.I used this kind of notation all the time when exporting logged historical data from SCADA systems into a file whose name I wanted to quickly communicate the start of a log and how long it ran:
20230701T0000-07--P30D..v101_pressure.csv
(“
--
” is the ISO-8601 (2004) recommended substitute for “/
” in file names)If anyone is interested, I made this Bash script to give me
uptime
but expressed as an ISO 8601 time period.$ bkuptime P2DT4H22M4S/2023-08-15T02:01:00+0000, 2 users, load average: 1.71, 0.87, 0.68
Lot of talk of numerics only. The problem there is knowing what format the information is in since clearly there are 3 possibilities. Without context and during certain parts of the month you’re hosed. Best to remove ambiguity and go with the alpha numeric format.
DD MMM YY (or alternatively YYYY)
11 Aug 2023
Ambiguity gone.
23 Aug 23. Ya, no ambiguity. /s
2023-08-23 is the way.
Any date format can be unambiguous as long as it’s the one that everyone agrees on, and all date formats will be ambiguous as long as we have several in use.
I kinda gave up, nowadays when i write a date to someone i specify the date format. Like i will send “01/05/2024 (DD/MM/YYYY)” because it’s the only way to be sure
The second reason why yyyy-MM-dd is the correct way to write days (beside being sortable by default) is because even Americans doesn’t have any similar format that it can be confused with.
I learned this in my first half year as a programmer I think, somewhere well over a decade back and so far it seems that guy was right.
As monsterous as it is yyyy-mm-dd could also be misconstrued by said unfortunate Americans as yyyy-dd-mm because…well…yeah. As noted elsewhere this dd mmm yyyy format also works nicely in written and verbal communication as 12th of august where no one ever is going to write or speak to each other twenty twenty three august twelfth. So again, more universal and less ambiguous.
There’s no amibuity with year first and done properly like YYYY-MM-DD.
Your reasoning is that the ambiguity exists due to using numbers. The ambiguity is only for 2/3 numerical methods
As monstrous as it is yyyy-mm-dd could also be misconstrued by said unfortunate Americans as yyyy-dd-mm because…well…yeah. As noted elsewhere this dd mmm yyyy format also works nicely in written and verbal communication as 12th of august where no one ever is going to write or speak to each other twenty twenty three august twelfth. So again, more universal and less ambiguous.
Problem is that languages get in the way. Some are pretty similar like
15 ago
(Spanish) being15 Aug
(English), but1 ene
(Spanish) aren’t that similar to1 Jan
(English).And for the usual “But English is used everwhere! I live in X!” crowd: NO, it isn’t. Not everything you see as an “expat” is the same as the actual locals with their own language.
This is big pp idea and I like it.
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I use it everywhere too. Screw the naysayers
Not on paper documents though. Here in Europe I have to write dd-mm-yyyy.
If you’re writing on paper, 10 August 2023 is superior.