• mkwarman@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    I’m definitely in the “for almost everything” camp. It’s less ambiguous especially when you consider the DD/MM vs MM/DD nonsense between US dates vs elsewhere. Pretty much the only time I don’t use ISO-8601 is when I’m using non-numeric month names like when saying a date out loud.

  • unomar
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    1 year ago

    ISO-8601 over all other formats. 2023-08-09T21:11:00Z

    Simple, sortable, intuitive.

    • protput@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Too long. Even 2023-08-09 is too long for me. But since I like the readability I use 2023.08.09. Less pixels and more readable then 20230809.

        • Aloha_Alaska@lemmy.world
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          My company has decided to standardized on phone numbers with dots instead of dashes. They’re in email signatures, memos, client proposals. I absolutely hate it and it rubs me the wrong way every time I see it. It’s wrong.

      • jerkface@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Same number of pixels, they are just different colours. But you still paid for them.

      • Pinklink@lemm.ee
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        1 year ago

        Although I actually like that format a lot, we use characters to help elicit context. 2023/08/09 is fine since we have been using / for dates for so long. Also it blows my mind why people don’t use : in 24 hour times. 16:40 is great, no am pm bullshit and you immediately know I’m talking time.

  • corytheboyd@kbin.social
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    1 year 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.

    • Cuttlefishcarl@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      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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        1 year 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.

          • Ageroth@reddthat.com
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            1 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

        • DV8@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          In British English you say the date before the month as well. I know that even saying the month first sounds very jarring too me.

        • Windows2000Srv@lemmy.ca
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          1 year 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!

      • pup_atlas@pawb.social
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        1 year 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.

      • glockenspiel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        America believes month/day/year for some stupid fucking reason.

        It’s because of Great Britain. We adopted it from them while a bunch of colonies and it regionally spread to others.

        America didn’t change, probably because we have been so geographically isolated (relatively speaking), whereas the modern day UK did change to be more like Europe.

        People get so goddamn hot and bothered by things that ultimately don’t matter almost like it is a culture war issue. Americans maintain the mm/dd/yyyy format because that’s how speak the dates.

        I wouldn’t say it is us Americans who “find it hard to read” if someone from elsewhere in the world sees an American date, knows we date things in the old way they used to date things, and then loses their minds over having to swap day for month. Everyone just wants to be contrarian and circle jerk about ISO and such.

        Us devs, on the other hand, absolutely should use the same format of yyyy-mm-dd plus time and time zone offset, as needed. There’s no reason, in this age, for dates to be culturally distinct in the tech space. Follow a machine-first standard and then convert just like we do with all other localizatons.

        But hey, if people want to be pedantic, let’s talk about archaic gendered languages which are completely useless and has almost zero consistency.

        • Fonzie!@ttrpg.network
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          1 year ago

          Bruh even Britain uses day-month-year, even speaks them as “9th of September”.
          “September 9th” doesn’t even make sense in English as there is only 1 September in a year.

          America did this.
          There is no excusing that.

      • Pulptastic
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        1 year 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.

          • Drusenija@lemmy.world
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            1 year ago

            Or anyone who has to work with Americans. Especially when you also work with other countries as well. You can’t assume dd/mm/yyyy or mm/dd/yyyy blindly in either case. yyyy-mm-dd solves the issue entirely because both sides at least agree that yyyy-dd-mm isn’t a thing.

    • Djtecha@lemm.ee
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      1 year 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

      • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        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
    • dilawar@lemm.eeB
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      1 year 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.

      • pomodoro_longbreak@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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@sh.itjust.works
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    1 year 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.

  • TeckFire@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Upvoted because I appreciate the exposure for this dating method, but I personally use it for everything. Much clearer for a lot of reasons IMO. Biggest to smallest pretty much always makes the most sense.

  • realbaconator@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    ISO 8601 gang. You’d never want to describe dates that way but for file management the convenience is massive.

  • words_number@programming.dev
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    1 year 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.

      • azertyfun@sh.itjust.works
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        1 year ago

        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.

        • arbitrary@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          YYYY-DD-MM, DD-YYYY-MM, or MM-YYYY-DD

          What the actual fuck

          ‘hey man, what date is it today?’ ‘well it’s the 15th of 2023, August’

            • Futurama@lemmy.world
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              1 year ago

              I want to try this, too. Make it more possessive, though. The 15th of 2023’s August. Really add to the confusion.

        • naticus@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          I’ll avoid those at all cost and go with the new standard of YY-MM-DD-YY. What’s the date today? 20-08-10-23

          • luciferofastora@discuss.online
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            1 year ago

            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.

      • rmuk@feddit.uk
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        1 year ago

        Twelve ways if you count two-digit years. My nephew was born on 12/12/12 which was convenient.

    • sift@lemmy.world
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      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.

      • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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        1 year ago

        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.

    • zagaberoo@beehaw.org
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      1 year 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.

    • FleetingTit@feddit.de
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      1 year ago

      ISO 8601 ftw. Here’s the date, time, and duration for our next meeting:

      2023-08-10T20:00:00PT2H30M

        • baltakatei@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year 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
          
  • SlopppyEngineer@discuss.tchncs.de
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    1 year ago

    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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          1 year 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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            1 year 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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              1 year 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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                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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          Yes spreadsheet apps like excel do this. If I remember correctly MMMM would write the full month. January.

      • SlopppyEngineer@discuss.tchncs.de
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        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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          1 year 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…