• corytheboyd
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    652 years ago

    Christ, do this many people really find iso8601 hard to read? It’s the date and the time with a T in the middle.

    • 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.

      • @pythonoob@programming.dev
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        122 years ago

        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.

        • @Windows2000Srv@lemmy.ca
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          12 years ago

          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!

          • @Ageroth@reddthat.com
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            -11 year ago

            I will never stop being impressed by the absolute insanity that is British rhyming slang. Apparently I’ve never heard seppo before, short for septic tank, rhyming with Yank. I just learned a new mildy derogatory term for Americans, nice

      • @pup_atlas@pawb.social
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        22 years ago

        I am an American and I use it religiously for the record. Especially for version numbers. Major.minor.year.month.day.hour.minute-commit. It sorts easy, is specific, intuitive, and makes it clear which version you’re using/working on.

      • @Pulptastic@midwest.social
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        22 years ago

        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.

    • @Djtecha@lemm.ee
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      62 years ago

      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

    • SeaJ
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      52 years ago

      I use it all the time when writing dates.

    • dilawarB
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      12 years ago

      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.

  • xttweaponttx
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    602 years ago

    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.

      • Zeragamba
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        12 years ago

        nearly forgot that 8601 has support for durations as well

        • baltakatei
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          12 years ago

          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 the T 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
          
  • @words_number@programming.dev
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    2 years ago

    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.

    • @zagaberoo@beehaw.org
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      -42 years ago

      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.

      • @tchotchony@mander.xyz
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        42 years ago

        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.

      • @masterspace@lemmy.ca
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        2 years ago

        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.

        • @zagaberoo@beehaw.org
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          02 years ago

          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.

          • @masterspace@lemmy.ca
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            2 years ago

            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.

            • @zagaberoo@beehaw.org
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              12 years ago

              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.

              • @masterspace@lemmy.ca
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                2 years ago

                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.

                • @zagaberoo@beehaw.org
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                  02 years ago

                  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.

      • @Senchanokancho@feddit.de
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        22 years ago

        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.

  • YYYY-MM-DD for everything. My PC clock, my phone and even my handwritten notes all use that format.

    The only other acceptable format is military notation: DD MMM YYYY.

        • @Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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          22 years ago

          Considering how there’s almost no computers anymore with such limited resources that they can’t store a string or convert to one, it’s kind of crazy anybody bothers with the ambiguity of using numbers for the month.

          • @scubbo@lemmy.ml
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            32 years ago

            The limited resource is not Compute Power, but Engineer time. Sure, you could ask someone to implement wrappers everywhere in the system so that the display is human-readable - or you could put one label somewhere clarifying the date format to readers.

            • @Rodeo@lemmy.ca
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              12 years ago

              Implement wrappers everywhere? Why can’t they just write a single function that takes an ISO date a spits out a string (human readable) date? I’d put money down that such a function already exists in almost every library that deals with dates.

              • @scubbo@lemmy.ml
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                12 years ago

                That’s why I said “implement” and not just “write”. The process of wiring in that existing function has non-negligible cost, as does keeping it updated/patched.

                Sure, it should be pretty small - but it’s non-zero. Is it worth it? That’s a product decision.

        • @Samsy@lemmy.mlOP
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          12 years ago

          Yes spreadsheet apps like excel do this. If I remember correctly MMMM would write the full month. January.

      • It’s written like 07 Aug 2013. It’s consistent in character length, doesn’t confuse internationals, doesn’t take much space and is written exactly like being said around here. It’s just not that great for file names.

        • @flambonkscious@sh.itjust.works
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          22 years ago

          Yeah, ok. Expanding the month to 3 chars does reduce potential confusion

          I feel the need to be pedantic and point out that this is only necessary, however because of the ridiculous degenerate convention of MM DD YY(YY?) used by said country…

  • Jamie
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    252 years ago

    I enforce ISO 8601 for the shared storage in my office. Before I got there, files were kinda stored in all kinds of formats, but mostly month first.

    I tell the person under me she can store her files in her user any way she wants, but if it goes into shared storage, it’s ISO 8601. I even have a folder in there called !Date format: YYYY-MM-DD Description to help anyone else remember.

    • Rootiest
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      52 years ago

      Haha I did the same.

      It was the Wild West, no standard, everyone used their own date format all in the same shared storage.

      I’ve got most of the office doing it correctly now

          • I imagine your complaint was referring to a community name in the abstract “/c/iso8601” rather than the proper Lemmy centralized name !lemmy.ml!@/c/iso8601 or whatever the horrible format that it is

            • @bug@lemmy.one
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              12 years ago

              My complaint was about the “subreddits as hashtags” thing that people did on Reddit where they’d link a non-existent sub (or one that only contained screenshots of people linking to it) instead of thinking of something original.

              Separately, what’s wrong with the !iso8601@lemmy.ml format? It’s pretty simple to remember and is very much part of the federated way that Lemmy is designed to be used!

              • Linking communitirs !iso8601!@someinstance is one of the core reasons why Lemmy failed to capture even 1% of 1% of 1% of Reddit’s userbase at probably the greatest time of turmoil of discontent with that site for the next 5 years.

                This formulation insist on centralizing communities in single instances and creates both fragmentation of the community while also making them concentrated on whatever the biggest one is.

                The few users that make it past the registration catastrophe, when they realize this is how communities work, they just leave, because it means Lemmy isn’t federated where it counts. Communities end up owned by a single instance owner and mod team. It’s Reddit except somehow worse.

  • keeslinp
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    222 years ago

    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.

    • nickwitha_k (he/him)
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      2 years ago

      Maybe we should form some sort of organization, on an international stage, dedicated to creating and maintaining such standards.