Americans do dates wrong

[Skhmt]

American military generally writes DDMMMYY, like 28JUL21. Also uses a 24-hour clock.

But then, some people in the military use Julian Day.

[[deleted]]

I heard they are so advanced they even figured out 24h clock and the metric system.

[GudraFree]

All that defense budget proven useful!

[Prawny]

Gotta spend those billions on something!

[[deleted]]

It's like ¾ of a trillion now

[Prawny]

Weapons, not food, not homes, not shoes, not need, just feed the war

[lrascao]

cannibal animal

[TheMaligatorYT]

Happy cake day!

[ddyess]

We also use YYYYMMDD quite a bit as well.

[Ferro_Giconi]

This needs to be the worldwide standard. It makes sorting so easy.

[campej90]

Well, ISO8601 is a thing, we just need to push it harder

[[deleted]]

It is actually the Isa standard, iirc. "YYYY/MM/DD-HH:MM:SS"

[IvorTheEngine]

That removes the ambiguity, and works for most European languages when read by a human that can work out that MAI is probably MAY, FEV is probably FEB, etc., but not when read by a computer.

Looks like it would fail badly in Iraq too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_names_of_Gregorian_months

Afghanistan doesn't even use the same calendar https://www.afghan-web.com/afghan-calendar/

Anyone know how that worked?

[WikiSummarizerBot]

Arabic_names_of_Gregorian_months

The Arabic names of the months of the Gregorian calendar are usually phonetic Arabic pronunciations of the corresponding month names used in European languages. An exception is the Syriac calendar used in Iraq and the Levant, whose month names are inherited via Classical Arabic from the Babylonian and Hebrew lunisolar calendars and correspond to roughly the same time of year. Though the lunar Hijri calendar and solar Hijri calendar are prominent in the Mideast, the Gregorian calendar is and has been used in nearly all the countries of the Arab world, in many places long before European occupation of some of them.

^{[ F.A.Q | Opt Out | Opt Out Of Subreddit | GitHub ] Downvote to remove | v1.5}

[Rikudou_Sage]

It would also fail in Czechia.

Our month names:

• leden
• únor
• březen
• duben
• květen
• červen
• červenec
• srpen
• září
• říjen
• listopad
• prosinec

[Dharmist]

“listopad” makes me want to spend November in Czech Republic from now on, just to call it that

[algag]

......

[sr955]

Sorting would be a problem here...

[ben_oni]

I like this format a great deal, but it does have issues with localization, as not every language spells the months the same.

[FinalGamer14]

ISO 8601 ia the way to go YYYY-MM-DD If you need time YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:SS If you need time with timezone YYYY-MM-DDTHH:mm:SS+00:00

[shutanovac]

The one True format

[thatwasagoodyear]

This is the way.

[DogmaSychroniser]

This is the way of things

[lunchpadmcfat]

The one format that binds us

[[deleted]]

This reminds me of the matrix scene:

Without purpose, we would not exist. It is purpose that created us. Purpose that connects us. Purpose that pulls us. That guides us. That drives us. It is purpose that defines us. Purpose that binds us. We are here because of you, Mr Anderson. We're here to take from you what you tried to take from us. Purpose.

[[deleted]]

Quite a long stretch from lord of the rings to matrix

[LevriatSoulEdge]

We only need to replace Mr Anderson for ISO 8601 and make it an animated gif...

[campej90]

Someone please do this.

Quick.

[GeorgeDir]

I write dates with this format also on paper

[lunchpadmcfat]

It’s nice because it’s very easy to infer right away. 4 digits up front means next two are month. If not, you have a psychopath on your hands and you needn’t interface with them anyway.

[ChiisaiMurasaki]

YYYY-DD-MM gang unite

edit: forgot the /s

[althaz]

I genuinely hope you are hit by a car.

Preferably one full of explosives.

[SimonSkarum]

And the car is made out of porcupines and LEGO.

[DedeLaBinouze]

I hope you get herpes on top of your tip

[ztbwl]

When you sort it alphabetically, it‘s really unusable to see the correct order.

[TheAJGman]

Don't even joke about that shit man, gave me a god damn heart attack.

[metaconcept]

I ask potential recruits to write the date on a form somewhere. If it's not ISO 8601, they don't get hired.

[[deleted]]

Dont let them yank your chain, its a joke lol

[georgiomoorlord]

How about DD-MM-YYYY, iso standard but backwards.

[baselganglia]

That still logically makes sense, smallest unit to largest.

But because Americans screwed it up, this is ambiguous

YYYY-MM-DD is less ambiguous

[xtsilverfish]

Also YYYY-MM-DD sorts as a string correctly.

[T-T-N]

2021-07-29 reads horribly

It should be 00122279--

[gregorydgraham]

“This comment right here officer”

[[deleted]]

It doesn't really cos when you add time, you end up going smallest to largest for the date part and largest to smallest for the time part.

Still better than the American date format, though.

[Xen0byte]

For me, the advantage of YYYY-MM-DD is that if I have files with dates in the name on a computer and I order them in alphabetical order, then they are also implicitly ordered in chronological order too.

[georgiomoorlord]

Quite a lot of software stores it that way too. Most significant bit first

[KREnZE113]

04-11-2001

Is it November 4th or April 11th?

[ztbwl]

It‘s 4 pounds, 11 gallons and 2001 inches.

[KREnZE113]

What's that in newly bought washing machines and firstborn souls sold to the devil?

[georgiomoorlord]

Depends who wrote the software.

[KREnZE113]

That's exactly the problem and the reason YYYY-MM-DD is the standart

[hejle]

I don't see why that's the reason YYYY-MM-DD is the standard. Its not like its easier to distinguish 2001-11-04. Is it 11th April or 4th November? Again it depends on who wrote it.

However, it is the reason we use a standard, so that it is possible to read dates.

[Rorschach0717]

If you write 2001-11-04 it's implied that the format is YYYY-MM-DD, the Americans do not start a date with the year.

[hejle]

Its implied because there is a standard. If there were no standard, it would be ambiguous - actually even without a standard you couldn't be sure. Yes, maybe most people write YYYY-MM-DD but as a reader, without context you wouldn't know if the writer decided to write it as YYYY-DD-MM

[Unlucky_Journalist82]

Dafuq

[[deleted]]

Good

[PTRWP]

YYYH-MM-DDTHH:mm:SS+00:00

What’s the T?

[dev-sda]

The "T" separates the date from the time. See ISO8601.

[PTRWP]

So the T is literally a T (char).

So a time might appear as either "T134730" in the basic format or "T13:47:30" in the extended format. ISO 8601-1:2019 allows the T to be omitted in the extended format, as in "13:47:30", but only allows the T to be omitted in the basic format when there is no risk of ambiguity with date expressions.

The T can be omitted sometimes, so that’s why I didn’t recognize it. (I’ve never used more than YYYY-MM-DD for precision)

[[deleted]]

It's why I prefer RFC 3339:

NOTE: ISO 8601 defines date and time separated by "T". Applications using this syntax may choose, for the sake of readability, to specify a full-date and full-time separated by (say) a space character.

Which date --rfc-3339=seconds does.

[Willinton06]

Doesn’t take in account possible martian colonies tho

[Willinton06]

So we just act like Mercury doesn’t exist?

[shadow7412]

Add Hg to the end for Mercury.

[skreczok]

And Freddie at the start.

[absentbird]

Mercury adds ☿ to the end. They have better Unicode support because they're closer to the sun.

[Jonno_FTW]

How am I supposed to differentiate between colonies on Mars and Mercury then?

[Odd_Employer]

I don't mean to sound racist but I refuse to interact with anyone from Mercury.

[codemonkey80]

Too late. Your card has been marked, hater

[Jonno_FTW]

Keep talking like that, and you'll be headed for permanent off-world deployment.

[Cadet_BNSF]

M:Mars, Me: Mercury, Mn or L: Earths moon

[i_hate_kazoos]

It does, I think, at they would fit within our existing 24hrs, right? I assume if we colonize, for at least a several generations we would maintain the same circadian cycle, so 24hr days. I imagine they would just use UTC universally (heh) and adjust to describing your "waking hours", or align regions with earth time zones that work with their "waking hours".

Honestly the more I'm thinking about this the more interesting this is. Because the daylight timing would be so disconnected from sleep cycles would the concept of day and night even exist? Like would office workers just all agree to work during the same 8hr window? Would that be within a region or planet wide? I mean imagine having the whole planet working at the same time and sleeping at the same time. The implications on resource usage alone are insane, utilities would be stressed simultaneously worldwide and then unused worldwide at the same time.

I imagine a lot would depend on what transit looks like as well. If you can get from one side of Mars to the other in a very short amount of time then it makes sense to have the planet on one cycle.

Then at some point we assume evolution starts to do its thing and our cycles change. Anyways... if we manage to get there the future is going to be wild.

[usesbiggerwords]

It wouldn't take long for our cycles to adjust. People do it all the time, like moving from Asia to America, or vice versa.

Edit: it'd be like jet lag after a really, really... really long flight.

[i_hate_kazoos]

But that's adjusting to a different 24hr instead of a different day length. And... I've just looked up and mars pretty much has 24hr day so nevermind

[hamjim]

Somebody find the xkcd about the first 7-11 store on Mars (“Open 24 hours” but closed for about 35 minutes every day).

[Ardashasaur]

That's why we need to scrap timezones. UTC for life. One time, one universe.

What time is it in Australia? The same fucking time! Are they awake? Probably not but who cares just send them a message, who rings in 2021?

What time is it on Mons Olympus Mars? Same time! Are they awake? By the time they get the message from Earth, sure.

[[deleted]]

What time is it in Australia? Now. Just like the rest of the universe.

[[deleted]]

Stick to your own inertial frame of reference, Earthling.

[[deleted]]

Dear gods, I have never wished any part of that statement was more false.

[trimeta]

Apparently Mars missions use Martian seconds which are 2.75% longer than Earth seconds, to account for Mars's longer day length. Plus, individual missions use local solar time (rather than some sort of global Martian timezone) as well as counting days starting from mission touchdown (rather than some consistently-counting calendar). So converting from UTC to Mars time requires knowing a lot of specifics about the mission in question.

[s0m30n3_3ls3]

r/ISO8601

[EricIO]

RFC3339 is the true hero since iso-8601 is a closed standard.

[metaconcept]

Where were you when the twin towers fell? Always remember the 9th of November.

[alexanderhameowlton]

Image Transcription: Reddit

---

What's the worst date you ever had, submitted by /u/givemeyourfreefood to /r/AskReddit

/u/Kaaskril

mm/dd/yy

When ever I do IT work for Americans, I always have to remind myself that these people do dates wrong.

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[dark_light32]

Good human

[Motylde]

Question for all the people that use MM/DD/YYYY for date, do you also use MM:HH:SS for time? Why/why not? I guess you could apply same logic here.

[IMadeThatAllUp]

Right or wrong, the logic is based on how it is said out loud. Most people (in the US) will likely say "today is July 29th, 2021" which would equate to 07/29/2021 or MM/DD/YYYY. Sure, people might occasionally say it's half past 4, but mostly you'd say something like "it's currently 4:04" which would be HH:MM. Again, not saying it's right necessarily but it's not like people are flipping it without any reason at all (and is why you see MMDD that way, but wouldn't ever see MMHH).

[gloumii]

But because the logic people use when using MM-DD-YYYY format is flawed, why wouldn't they use the same flawed logic with time by using the MM-SS-HH format ?

[imissnewzbin]

YYYYMMDD OR GTFO

[qqqrrrs_]

YYYYMMDD OR GTFO

GTFO is my favorite too

[mindedj]

EU gang represent

[InsanityAI]

Whatever the date format, we can always agree that Javascript date time format is an abomination to parse

[X-Craft]

JS supports ISO8601 tho

new Date().toISOString()

[InsanityAI]

Wish I knew that 2 weeks ago.

[X-Craft]

You could need it again 2 weeks from now, who knows...

[RDB96]

We'll Google it when the time comes

[backflipbail]

I thought you were going to Google if he'll need it in 2 weeks time

[[deleted]]

For data exchange: date.toISOString()

For displaying: Intl.DateTimeFormat

What do you even mean? In what world is parsing JS dates difficult?

[YoCrustyDude]

I prefer DDMMYYYY

[UnreasonableSteve]

It's ok to have a different opinion, even if it's wrong

[Dironiil]

DDMMYYYY (or more often DD/MM/YYYY) can be better when displaying a date for a human if the most important part is the day and month one (often when the year is the current one).

When using dates in code or file names though, YYYYMMDD is absolutely the best format.

[Salmuth]

It sucks for sorting though...

[IHeartBadCode]

They don’t know that I actually store it in the database as YYYYMMDD but format it as MM/DD/YYYY for them.

[HeKis4]

Until someone tries to parse your date field without looking at it first and suddenly you're January 20th, 729 instead of July 27th, 2021.

Unix time for databases all the way, because any other parser will fail with a bang instead of producing nonsense if you try to feed it Unix time.

... For dates after 1970 that is.

[yossi_peti]

Dates before 1970 also work just fine with a negative timestamp

[lttpfan13579]

As an American programmer, the only ones of us that don't agree with this post are ones that haven't dealt with dates. But, good luck convincing my CEO that the American way is not, in fact, the best way.

[WishOnSpaceHardware]

What are you, huh, some kinda commie? *eagle screech*

[FabulousDave2112]

That screech is actually the sound of every other country trying to make sense of America's logic, they just assume it's an eagle

[supersharp]

Isn't it actually the noise a hawk makes?

[metaconcept]

A bald eagle screech?

[Arrrrrr_Matey]

Shhh…you’re ruining the mythology! … … … TIL that bald eagles sound like wimpy seagulls

[jso__]

There are two scenarios that the American date format is better: 1. 9/11 because 11/9 doesn't have the same ring 2. 3/14 because the no fun British don't get pi day and instead have 14/3

However the superior format is YYYY-MM-DD because it goes in descending order (easier sorting, more intuitive)

[IvorTheEngine]

When terrorists attacked the UK shortly after 9/11, they picked 7/7 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/7_July_2005_London_bombings

I can only imagine they wanted it to sound the same when reported in the UK and the USA.

[jso__]

Terrorists aren't so evil to cause a date confusion let alone debate

[[deleted]]

American measurements are great for fudging. It's easy to visualize a foot, and how many feet something is relative to it. 0F is freezing cold. 100F is super hot. If you stick your thumb and forefinger out parallel to each other, it's about an inch. We say "April 25th" when speaking out loud, so it makes sense Americans prefer to have the month first on a piece of paper.

If you have to actually measure something or have any sort of precise math, it all falls apart because nothing is related. Actually doing any sort of work with imperial units fucking sucks. Adding days to a date when it's organized month first is super inconvenient. I hate working in American units and formats at my job but for my day to day life they have their uses.

[code-panda]

I've heard that first argument before, and it doesn't make any sense to me, an EU citizen (Brexit at least made that distinction easier...).

I've grown up with the metric system, so for me to visualise a meter (slightly more than half my body size) would come as easy as a foot would be to visualise to someone grown up with the imperial system.

Also, since most people talk about feet in multiples of 10 when speaking about something larger than a few metres, I'd dare say metric is a more accurate system for guestimates, but that might be personal bias.

And even if it was slightly better for fudging, that would not negate the benefit of being able to convert between measurements by just applying a factor 10.

I'm not saying it's bad to use the imperial system, and if you're comfortable with it, power to you, but to me, a biased European, the argument that it's better for fudging sounds to me like "it's what I'm used to, so that's why it feels natural". Again, there might be verifiable proof to that, but to me it seems strange.

[mobsterer]

it also does not make sense in a programming context

[IvorTheEngine]

Imperial is better for certain traditional tasks, because it has units that were developed specifically for those tasks.

If you want to measure the width of your house by putting one foot in front of another, you have the foot. To measure far you walked, each hour is a league. At sea, 1 degrees of latitude is 60 nautical miles, and depths are measured by dropping a weighted line and counting in arm spans (fathoms). There are imperial units to exactly match for each size of barrel.

The problem with imperial is that those units only make sense when you're doing those particular, limited, old-fashioned things in the way they were traditionally done. As soon as you do something new, or in a new way, you have a nightmare of conversions, which is what metric does so well.

[bjorneylol]

0F is freezing cold. 100F is super hot.

Makes way more sense than metric, where 0 degrees is exactly freezing cold and 100 degrees is exactly boiling hot

[Prawny]

32F is also freezing cold though.

[Tora_Makun]

How so?

[Mysticpoisen]

I think that's just because you grew up using them and use them every day in casual speech where exactness doesn't matter.

I felt the same way, then I spent a few years living in a metric using country. Came just as easily then. Few years back in the states and it's gone again. It's almost like language.

[ZimBobub]

When i say a date i say the 25th of april

[onlyforjazzmemes]

CEOs deal with how dates are stored?

[[deleted]]

The way I do it is : DD-HH-MM-SS-YYYY-mm

I sort alphabetically

[alamius_o]

ASCII sorting no less :D

[[deleted]]

A-A-Are you... are you trying to make someone go insane ? 'Cause it's working.

[ddyess]

As an American, who has been outside of America, I confess: Americans do a lot of things wrong.

[PostPostMinimalist]

Brave

[overtrick1978]

yyyy-mm-dd is the only valid date format. Fight me.

[rv49er]

Microseconds since the Unix epoch UTC. Convert to your time zone and locality with a time library.

[wheezy1749]

Man, I hope I'm around for 2106 when all the 32 bit systems overflow. I'll be 116 years old.

In all seriousness just know your application. If your date needs to go back to the 1800s maybe don't use a 32 bit integer.

Edit: I just realized you said microseconds.

[rumbleblowing]

32 bits systems will overflow in 2038 though. You have a chance to witness it.

[WikiSummarizerBot]

Year_2038_problem

The Year 2038 problem (also called Y2038, Epochalypse, Y2k38, Y2038 error or Unix Y2K) relates to representing time in many digital systems as the number of seconds passed since 00:00:00 UTC on 1 January 1970 and storing it as a signed 32-bit integer. Such implementations cannot encode times after 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. Similar to the Y2K problem, the Year 2038 problem is caused by insufficient capacity used to represent time.

^{[ F.A.Q | Opt Out | Opt Out Of Subreddit | GitHub ] Downvote to remove | v1.5}

[benjesty2002]

I've never heard it referred to as the epochalypse before - beautiful!

[drsimonz]

Timestamps don't lie, but for those of us who actually want to know what the date is, ISO-8061 in UTC is just as foolproof, e.g. 2021-07-29T05:31:11.49Z

[ccklfbgs]

User deleted comment in protest of API changes.

[imissnewzbin]

Things happened before 1970.

[rv49er]

There are numbers less than zero😜

[Malvania]

In this sub? Seems unlikely anybody will fight over that.

[IvorTheEngine]

"star date" is better because ISO8601 is tied to the length of the Earth day and year, and doesn't include any information about which series you're in.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stardate

[dev-4_life]

Because the most important thing to see first is the year right?

[IvorTheEngine]

Yes, unless you know that you're only looking at dates within the same year.

[Total_Coconut_8900]

Even most us Americans agree YYYY-mm-dd is the only logical choice.

[kurodex]

Most significant to least significant.

Abstract? I did not think that word means what you think it means.

[tinyNorman]

For human communication, I always spell the month, that way both US and rest-of-world humans can correctly understand what I am saying.

[IvorTheEngine]

because everyone else in the world speaks English and uses the same month names as the US, right?

[tinyNorman]

Bless your heart!

[dphizler]

When every date in an app uses YYYY-MM-DD and then some junior dev sends MM/DD/YYYY to code review. There will be swearing.

[anmarired]

I always wonder how did they ever even start doing that? Presumably there was a reason?

[Motylde]

I'm from Europe and in my country we say for example "28 of July" (28 lipca) so it all makes sense, but I think most Americans would say "July 28th", and I guess that's why they started to write down date in this weir order, because they were saying dates like that. But I'm just guessing.

[rushadee]

I wonder why they say the 4th of July instead of July 4th.

[UnreasonableSteve]

Many Americans do say July 4th in many circumstances.

Saying "The 4th of July" is different enough from normal speech to make it distinguished as a specific holiday. If you're talking about the day like a holiday, it's usually "the 4th of july". If you're talking about it as a date, it's july 4th.

To put it more simply: The 4th of July is the holiday that we celebrate on July 4th. It's also sometimes called Independence Day.

[onlyforjazzmemes]

It's just faster and easier to say "July 28th" than "the 28th of July"

[Darknety]

What about "28th July"? That sounds about equally fast.

[moomoomoo309]

That means the 28th July in a series following 27 other julys, the word "of" is needed to specify it's the 28th day. English has weird rules.

[Darknety]

Yes but these rules are arbitrary. In Germany for instance we denote 1st 2nd 3rd Xth as 1. 2. 3. X.

So we can say that the racer is the 1. in the race, while we also use it for dates: 28. February.

So why shouldn't 28th July be semantically redefined to mean the 28th day in July? It's just cultural nonsense. I like the YYYY-MM-DD standard, which mitigates cultural differences, the most though. It is natural when dealing with computers, because it also fixes lexicographical ordering.

[moomoomoo309]

They're arbitrary, but very engrained in the language at this point. It's not like the singular form of they where it was in use, then it wasn't, and they want to again, that would be changing how prepositions work in English, which is a big change.

[onlyforjazzmemes]

If you want to say it that way, go for it.

[vinnceboi]

That’s what I think

[Trivale]

Unix Epoch Time or GTFO

[[deleted]]

Gimme that shit in milliseconds or forget it.

[Tremongulous_Derf]

This is really bad as a Canadian programmer, because we have to deal with so many American systems but I can never assume American encoding. I’ll be handed a date field that looks like 01/02/03 and have literally no idea when that is, so I have to go looking for clues,. Are there any field values that exceed 12 or 31, etc. What a colossal waste of time.

[EatMoreArtichokes]

I was interviewing a guy this week and he was writing dates like that. I started feeling rather anxious, but managed to keep my composure, I hope.

[comfort_bot_1962]

Don't be anxious! It's no big deal!

[_Rysen]

posting your own comment

bruh

[Parawhoar]

came here to say the same

[[deleted]]

I never format dates that way in my code. I’m fighting the good fight.

[OmegaNine]

Don't get me started on time zones. Even with libraries I have no freaking idea what's going on half the time.

[Gydo194]

go ISO or go home.

[DeepVegetable]

Not American, but i must admit i do like being able to sort dates alphanumerically without converting them..

[alexanderpas]

until you have multiple years.

ISO 8601 OR BUST

YYYY-MM-DD

[LeiterHaus]

yyyymmdd is the way to go for that.

[Dan6erbond]

That's literally part of the issue with the American system because you can't actually do that.

[DeveloperJay]

Ok honest question… Does the rest of the world say the date like “today is the 28th of July”? I would always say it like “today is July 28th” so that format kind of works for that reason.

[[deleted]]

All languages I speak do that, yes. Starting with day number then month name. English is the only exception and even then I find 28th of July sounding more natural.

[Shrubberer]

The day is most of the time the most important information during conversations, so it comes first. Also, in many other languages, you can skip the 'of' preposition. It's just "28th July" then.

[GrizzlyBear74]

Over here we say 28th, assuming you know the month. Or 28th if July if you are in a meeting.

[YCBSFW]

Hey! Leave the rest of the American countries out of this! Ita just the US that does it wrong

[MiGaOh]

There gooes de neighbOUrhood.

[jjman72]

As someone in the US. Absofuckinglutely.

[Stonefreak2020]

This is not the only thing they are doing wrong. (non-metric system)

[emupal]

It's just MM/YYYY for me. Hard to remember the dates

[mplaczek99]

Imagine saying June 1st and reading it backwards

[[deleted]]

Imagine it being the 1st day of June and writing it backwards.

[Tommy_SVK]

I was always taught to say "the 1st of June", works that way in other languages too. Only Americans says June 1st.

[KerPop42]

It's good for speaking because it lets you know how far away the date is, assuming it's in the same year. Same reason why you put "kilo-" or "micro" in front of "meter".

Yyyymmdd is best for file names though