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Oh no! A country uses a different date format, the horror!
Aug 9, 2023and08/09/23literally say the same thing.No, the second one says “Sept. 8th 2023” and that last panel is obviously British (you can tell by the teeth) /s
They do but one informs the reader of the order of the format while the other doesn’t.
Look it’s easy, you just wait until the 13th of the month to figure out which format it is. Is 12 days really so much to ask?
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August 9th 2023 would be 09.08.2023 in Germany though 😉
Also changing it to periods doesn’t avoid confusion about the order. Also pretty sure we fought a whole war over not being like the Germans, so…
It’s quite simple really. The order is “small to big”. You start with the smallest unit, in this case the day. Then follows the next largest unit, the month, and finally the year. Basically the same as in the top picture, but in reverse order.
The first isn’t ambiguous at all; the second is hella ambiguous.
It’s only ambiguous because there’s a second standard.
Is 08/09/2023 August or September? What about 08.09.2023? Do you see where the problem lies?
08/09/23 literally says the 8th day of september.
That’s why I write 9 Aug ‘23
If it’s a file I want sorted by date the top is good. If I am talking about a date and spelling it out August the 9th of 2023 makes the most sense and seems natural, and if it’s a personal memo or date label on food I just use 08/09 with the zeros so I know it isn’t a fraction unless it’s frozen or shelf stable for long term storage where the year would be useful to know at which point it becomes 8/9/23
I thought everybody used different date formats based on need.
In UK we always say 9th of August 2023, ie the way our dates are written and i would say is more natural haha. Maybe Americans find it more natural the other way around because your dates are other way around. If you use the date system the uk has maybe it would sound more natural to speak perhaps.
I grew up on RuneScape and BBC programming, so I’ve been exposed to both formats for a long time (really fucked me up in spelling). I couldn’t say why August 9th sounds more natural, but it’s probably because most irl folks around me use it. The 9th of August didn’t sound bad, just more artificial, and it’s probably because my exposure to that spoken out was mostly media and pop culture.
🧐 4 Days ago
Alright, then I guess change the way you read a clock too… My day to day use doesn’t include the year at all. Just mm/dd
Why change the way you read a clock? year/month/day hour:minute:second
You would never read a clock as minute:second:hour, which is analagous to how Americans phrase dates.
Lot of people say “half passed” or “quarter 'til” and optionally include the hour.
I don’t, but some people do.
The 12-hour system is similar to this issue
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Americans write the date the way we would say it. August 9th 2023.
4th of July
That’s a holiday and an obvious exception. Most people don’t go around saying dates like that
9th of August, 2023
No need for the extra “of”
Americans pick up weird habits and then insist that it’s the right way. How is August 9th any better than 9th of August when the 9th is a subunit of August and not the other way around?
Another good example is the use of the imperial system. I’ve heard Americans often declare that it’s a better system for manual use compared to the metric system. But the metric system has prefixes that differ consistently by 3 orders of magnitude, whereas the imperial system has rather arbitrary jumps between each successive unit. The metric system needs much less cognitive effort even for manual use.
I can understand that it’s a matter of habit for Americans. But it’s the lack of acceptance that there is a problem that leads to other problems like crashing a spacecraft onto Mars.
Generally speaking you’re usually from 0 to 720 hours in a month: how many time in a year you have to remind people what month they are into vs. the single day?
Guy A: “Hey, what day is it?”
Guy B: “It’s Sunday, the 13th.”
Guy A: “Of…?” (gesturing to keep going)
Guy B: “Ah, right, we’re just 390 hours into August. You may have missed that.”
That’s in response to a poorly asked question.
"Hey what’s the date?
“August 13th”
Wait, you mean the last 2 are, in all fact, the same, exact, thing?
Yes.
That’s what kills me about people who rag on Americans.
We order our dates the way we say them, and we use a temperature system is a great way to describe feeling heat.
I’ve got no defense for imperial measurements beyond scooping up a cup of flour is easier than dumping it on a scale.
But people spend more energy shitting on the cultural norms of Americans than anyone else (especially Europeans) and then spend a lot of time telling us we have no culture.
and we use a temperature system is a great way to describe feeling heat
You know if you really think about it for even the slightest amount of time this makes absolutely no fucking sense. I can imagine why you state this, but to not spoil the fun I’d love to hear it from you.
The fahrenheit scale was created as a base for human temperature. The guy fucked up his math though because 100°f was supposed to be average body temp.
Celsius is temperature based on water.
Kelvin is based on universal scale.
Fahrenheit is based on the human body.
I don’t see how intent is relevant, to someone using Celsius, 40 degrees is hot because they’re used to that, that’s the only thing that matters. Besides, when it comes to body temperature, Celsius is a lot closer than Fahrenheit. Not to mention “it’s freezing outside” in Celsius is actually sub zero, and not a number close to your body temperature as it is in Fahrenheit.
Fahrenheit based his scale on what he thought to be absolute zero (i.e. the coldest temperature he could produce in his lab with the tools of his time) and his body temperature, which he set to 12, because 12 was a convenient number and used in a lot of scales in his pre-metric time. He did realize though that this scale was impractical, and halved his degrees until they deemed sensible to him, resulting in the final degrees to be ⅛ of the first draft. 8 * 12 = 96, hence 96° F was his second fixed point.
Which is just senseless, as we know today, as the temperature of the human body fluctuates over time. If we took the original definition seriously, everybody would have their own Fahrenheit scale that would differ over time.
Fahrenheit is not based on body temperature, it is based on the temperature of a mixture of ice and salt and the body temperature of a certain individual, both in 1714. Who was, by the way, suffering from hypothermia.
Gonna cry?
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09.08.2023 (dd/mm/yyyy) anybody?
It’s dd/MM/yyyy you nincompoop
I like it for reading and using the date day to day
But yyy-mm-dd is best for sorting and archiving files
This
People rarely use them in real life, but ISO 8601 and RFC 3339 (both are almost identical) are the most natural ways of writing date and time. Just like how we write numbers, their components are written from left to right in the decreasing order of significance: yyyy-mm-ddTHH:MM:SS. I like it by default for precisely the reason you mentioned - sorting. It even helps quick visual comparisons.
Why would you put the day first?
Because it changes most often.
Why does that mean it should go first?
Because you are able to read the thing that changes most often first. It is more convinient to read from left to right.
(1-12)/(1-31)/(XXXX)
I don’t think it’s an entirely ridiculous format.
9AUG2023
HOLY
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I like to think of the American style as machete ordering for dates.
I don’t know why you wanted to know year before month or day, I use dd/mm/yyyy sometime I didn’t even use yyyy just dd/mm because day change most frequent then month then year
YYYY-MM-DD is best when programming because it’s unambiguous and it makes sorting easier. For humans DD-MM-YYYY is indeed the most sensible.
Most sensible is a matter of opinion
If you’re talking dd/mm then mm/dd makes more sense, like a clock.
The first and the last date format are terrible because you can confuse the day of the month with the number of the month.
I only like date formats where it’s not possible to confuse any field, like 8 Aug 2023. I minimize ambiguity.
If the date is in a file name, I make an exception using 2023-08-09 such that a string sort is equal to a date sort.
For actually displaying dates to others, I agree that spelling out the month is absolutely preferred. But if space is limited, you’re somewhat required to pick a very shortened format, and the US version is dumb, even if that’s what you should use when displaying in that locale.
But for working with dates on computers, year-month-day works great, because it’s still human readable, is naturally sortable, and makes it easier for serialization.
The first one is conventionally never year-day-month, and if anyone ever sent me a date of 2023-17-08, I would respond with, “What the hell?! Are you being evil on purpose?”
It’s by smallest integer to largest, what’s weird about that?
12 months a year, up to 31 days a month and X number of years. It makes the most sense
Because it gets horribly fucky when you now have to figure out if a date is actually formatted as MM-DD-YY or DD-MM-YY.
Surely we’ve all handled reading an expiration date before and have wondered if we’re eating something OK or has expired months ago because they chose the other format.
(Honestly, I think both formats are shit, and the only correct way to do dates with numbers only is YYYY-MM-DD. If not, then at least use letters for months, like 30 AUG 2023)
Surely we’ve all handled reading an expiration date before and have wondered if we’re eating something OK or has expired months ago
No, I haven’t, and I don’t know anyone else who has
Then you’ve never bought imported food or never got food gifts overseas. Or never travelled to a country that used the format that you don’t use.
For example, 06/09/2023 could mean either you’re eating something that expires next month, or expired two months ago.
It should be ordered by significance (ideally descending). USA’s date is like putting the million between the thousands and the unit.
Try to figure out a way to sort it automatically and get back to me on why it’s stupid
Easy. Don’t store dates as a text string. That’s just bad programming.
When you say “don’t store dates as a string” what you’re really saying is “wait for someone else to solve the problem and release a library, then use that library”. That seems to be what the majority of the industry does (I’m a Java coder myself and joda is a lifesaver in that regard) but my point is that this problem is hard. Date and time stamps are a subtly difficult part of the average API monkey’s daily work.
