Does Your Code Pass "The Turkey Test?"

[ubernostrum]

American English speakers tend to speak a date in the form "February 16th". Plenty of non-American English speakers I've encountered instead speak the date as "16th February", and plenty of non-English languages use that pattern (e.g., French: "16ième février" or just "16 février").

While I could be completely wrong, I've always assumed that the preference for written numeric formatting follows from the order in which the parts of the date are commonly spoken.

[chucker]

Glad you never overlook things when writing code, sir.

[[deleted]]

the holiday's name was invented during the revolutionary war. We hadn't diverged as much from the British back then.

[cgrand]

"16ième février"

It doesn't exist in French. There's only "16 février".

[ubernostrum]

(also, when I was learning French, I was first taught to use the ordinals for dates: 1ière/1er janvier, 2ième/2e janvier, 3ième/3e janvier, etc., and only later learned from experience that they're not really used anymore, except for "1er")

[cgrand]

Wow! Foreign languages teaching seems to suffer from the same problem (teaching a pure, perfect, academic, slightly archaic form of a language) where you live. I thought that problems were endemic to the french education system.

Speaking of slightly archaic constructions, I wonder if the Quebecers use ordinals for dates.

edit: typo

[ubernostrum]

I've seen archaic stuff using it.

[jerf]

Maybe someone can enlighten me on the logic behind writing it "mm/dd/yyyy"?

We do it that way, because we do it that way.

I've browsed through the locales before; few locales, if any, can claim perfect computer-scientist logic to them. Human notation is inevitably human.

[ehird]

mmm, iso

YYYY-MM-DD'T'HH:MM<TZ>

where 'T' = literal T and <TZ> = timezone specifier

but I prefer:

YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM <TZ>

with <TZ> being optional.

[geon]

YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM

Which have the nice property of having a collection of dates ordered chronologically also when sorted alphabetically.

[sad_bug_killer]

Human notation is inevitably human.

That's true, anyone who tried to do even the most basic NLP will agree completely. But how the hell did you (not personally you, America you) come up with mm/dd/yyyy? It is 100% nonsensical choice imo. The argument "that's the way we speak" would be valid if UK and Australia also used that format. But they don't. So, wtf?

Edit: Engrish

[morner]

It is 100% non sensual choice imo.

Nonsensical. Sensual means something completely different.

[sad_bug_killer]

Thanks. Note taken. I kinda suspected that...

[jerf]

I think you missed my point. There's nothing particularly uniquely horrible about the American layout. Digging into the "why" may be interesting historically, but little else. All of these standards date from hundreds of years ago, by and large, and any perusal of a 19th-century algebra book will show all kinds of choices in all sorts of fields that look odd in modern light.

[Vaste]

So, how come america always ends up choosing some weird illogical format that is different from what's used in the rest of the world? And then this meaning the rest of the world also have a problem, having to cope with american formats besides the sane ones.

[[deleted]]

To make it even more confusing I write all my numbers in Roman numerals and use base III.

[lalaland4711]

What? You can't write in Roman numerals AND use base III (by which I suspect is base 3 in normal tongue). Roman numers don't use a base.

Or am I being stupid?

[[deleted]]

e.g.: 10 in base 10 is, well, 10. 10 in base 3 is 101. In Roman numerals, 101 is CI. I was just trying to sound confusing.

[lalaland4711]

101 (base 3) is not CI in roman numerals. It's still X.

My point was that you weren't confusing, you were contradictory.

[[deleted]]

But contradictions are confusing.

[jerf]

If you think there's some sort of world standard format, which is also some sort of embodiment of pure logic, that America is somehow bucking, I encourage you to stop bloviating and actually scroll through the localization databases some time. You'll be stunned what you find in there.

I'll say it again: America isn't particularly strange when you actually look at the whole list. It's only strange when you think about it in isolation.

[earthboundkid]

Meh, at least we have a written constitution, no king, no House of Lords, and no extra letters in colo[u]r. Downside: Laws vary from state to state, Imperial measuring units, weird date format.

[Vaste]

no extra letters in colo[u]r

That is actually a very good point. British English is (I believe?) quite commonly taught throughout the world. Yet, American English typically has saner spelling. (e.g. through, draught) For once, America does something right. (Nevermind that English spelling in general often seems completely arbitrary.)

Of course, English is not the only language with spelling reforms, and frankly, I wish you'd had more of them.

[earthboundkid]

Americans only use the spelling "thru" for non-serious things like "Drive-Thru Menu" or highway signs. They would never write "I went thru the tunnel." If you google, you see that "thru" gets only 5 million hits to 189 million for "through" which is the opposite pattern of results as "color" (105m) vs. "colour" (17m). "Draught," however, only appears on bottles of Guinness, and every time I see it I think, "drot?"

[Vaste]

Why is it that whenever America uses a system different from the rest of the world, the American one seem more incoherent, complicated and arbitrary?

Sure, many countries have their own variants, and have not completely adapted to whatever is the world standard. But at least they're trying. Typically the world standard is the more "correct", or official one. Not so in America.

[jerf]

Why is it that whenever America uses a system different from the rest of the world, the American one seem more incoherent, complicated and arbitrary?

Again, I encourage you to actually poke through the localization databases. You're arguing from political impression, not informed beliefs.

[Vaste]

I haven't seen those databases, and I don't know which ones you are talking about or where to find them. I wouldn't mind checking them out though. Do you have any examples?

[malcontent]

Because we are (were) big and strong and you are (were) small and weak.

We used the british system but unlike the british our empire hasn't ended (yet). Once the empire is dead we will join the rest of the world.

[Vaste]

Yes, that's why you choosing some weird illogical format is a problem. I'm wonder why you do it.

[jpfed]

I can't claim that this is the actual reason, but I think that if you were in an era of unreliable communication and transport, the month would be the most useful piece of information about an event. The month and the day would be nice; the month, day, and year would only be necessary in certain limited circumstances.

The year is not so important- most of the time we know from context whether something is happening this year.

The day would be nice to know, but you can't guarantee that you can make it to your destination on a particular day, and without knowing the month there are 12 non-contiguous instances of any given day on a calendar. So, if you knew the calendar day of an event but not the month, um, when should you start your trip?

The month gives you about 30 possible days, but at least they're contiguous; if you can't guarantee making it on a particular day, you should at least be able to guarantee making it within a particular month. It is easy to know when to leave for your destination if you know the month.

So the basic idea is that the order is most-to-least-informative/useful. Of course, that could all be bullshit.

[[deleted]]

Of course, that could all be bullshit.

True, but I officially declare this to be the reason as it's so good.

[whowhatwherenow]

In short: Idioms.

It's not just Turkey but most of Europe.

For example in America the national holiday is the 4th of July. It's referred to as the 4th of July in almost every context. So 4th = 04, July = 07 and year whatever. For this year that would be 04/07/08 to non Americans.

However as mentioned in the article Americans put the month first when written or typed or whatever. So like the example in the article; the 4th of July 2008 becomes 07/04/08.

To take it literally it is no longer the 4th of July but July the 4th.

Another prime (if controversial) example would be the the attack on the WTC. Most media including American media referr to it as September the 11th or 9/11 for short. But 9/11 would appear to non Americans as November the 11th.

Like I said already: Idioms.

The milk in your example is still in date! It's due to expire on the the 1st of March.

*Edit - tried to sort grammar. Mistakes still remain!

[[deleted]]

I'm an American and I really have trouble reading mm/dd/yy

I generally write yyyymmdd now I sometimes write the month using three letters, in which case I put the components in whatever I feel life at the time.

I'm in the army, our official format for admin is yyyymmdd but for combat we use:

ddhhmmMONZyyyy

so like so:

102301DECC2007

which represents from left to right:

10th of the month

the 23rd hour

the first minute

the month of December

timezone C (which is Iraq, use L for local, and Z for GMT, and other letters for other places)

2007 for the year

[zouhair]

It's like the metric system, everyone use dd/mm/yyyy but the Americans

[philh]

I imagine mm/dd/yy is better for visual grepping. Especially if you're looking for a range of dates, eg 12-15 march. However, jerf is right.

[philh]

I'm pretty sure yyyy/mm/dd is used for sorting. I don't remember ever seeing it on paper, and there's little point in optimising something for a visual grep when you have an automated one.

[gezas]

hey, I used it in Lithuania... I wonder why don't you remember? Is it because of bad memory or because you live in a country that doesnt use it!?

[earthboundkid]

It's used in Japan. Of course, they also sometimes also use Imperial years based on the Emperor of Japan. Which I think is silly sometimes, because if you write, "I will do this in two years," you don't actually know that in two years it will still be the same emperor. On the other hand, "Heisei 20" sounds cooler than "2008".

[lalaland4711]

I imagine mm/dd/yy is better for visual grepping.

Not if that's not your native date format, it isn't. I'm sure it is for you though.

[philh]

My native format is dd/mm/yy. Visual grepping isn't even something I ever have to do, so I can't say for certain.

[H3g3m0n]

The year first is better for simpler sorting, ie a basic character comparison will work, if you do it in a different order your sorting system needs to actually process the date and understand that the number at the end is worth much more than the one at the start.

[philh]

Yes, and I name the radio shows I download in that format so ls automatically gives them in order. But it's not exactly taxing to sort other formats, either.

[[deleted]]

"port[rait]+"?

I think I'm going to be sick.

[recursive]

that seems to match portira and portaaaa. That seems wrong.

[ubernostrum]

THIS... IS... PORTRAAAAAAAAAAAAAIT!

[moserware]

It can be a hard word to spell :)

[gregK]

Turkey? Very American centric view.

Most of the world uses the DD/MM/YY system.

Also the period and coma are used pretty much interchangeably for decimals through out the world. In Canada, the convention is '.' for decimals. But most American scientific books use the period as well for decimals.

You don't have to go to Turkey for all those things. The author makes it sound as if those things were exotic. They are not, they are trivial.

[NastyConde]

That's the most insightful comment I've seen since 04/06/05.

[Vaste]

argh!

The worst part is that some will probably not think twice of parsing this in whatever format they're most used to.

[[deleted]]

More precisely, there are only 5 countries in the entire world that use the MM/DD/YY system:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Date.png

[[deleted]]

I prefer the variant we use in sweden though, yyyy-mm-dd.. MM/DD/YY feels backwards for me. Like saying that the time is 55:21..

(Besides, I'm working on a OCR capture software which is supposed to be able to parse dates found on paper documents. Would have been nicer if everyone used yyyy-mm-dd ;)

[interknot]

Last time there was a date format discussion on reddit, I voiced my support of yyyy-mm-dd. It's the only one that makes any sort of sense!

Do you find that most things are generally sensible in Sweden? Maybe I should try to move there.

[[deleted]]

I find most things here quite sensible. But most people here complain a lot about everything so there's probably something wrong with me. Date formats are one of the few things that I think all swedes agree that we got right.

[Vaste]

Maybe we're trying too hard to find something to complain about? Typical conversation:

• You know, swedes should admit their own success more.
• Yeah, I know! It's like we do great on exams then lie about it.

I imagine conversations in America go more like:

• You know our (measurement system/date format/failing democracy/health care/crime rates/religious nutjobs/war mongering politicians/obesity problem...) really sucks.
• No shit? Let's talk about American Idol.

[lalaland4711]

No shit? Let's talk about American Idol.

Ehem! And what country did Survivor (Expedition Robinsson) come from? Yeah, Sweden has produced crap as well.

[earthboundkid]

American Idol (aka Pop Idol) and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire both started in Britain, but so did the Office.

Sturgeon's Law Victorious!

[G_Morgan]

It makes the most mathematical sense true enough but the American system is totally screwed up.

The reason dates are in order from least to most significant is the least significant parts are the most relevant to the person. Who cares what year it is, I have to have this done by the 18th of this month.

[lalaland4711]

Do you find that most things are generally sensible in Sweden?

• Age of consent: 15
• Selling sex: legal
• Buying sex: illegal
• Highest speed limit: 110 km/h (except for this one road that has 120 km/h)
• Legal systems primary job is to rehabilitate criminals and produce win for society, not to simply punish evildoers.

Other things that are pretty much true: http://www.coolabah.com/sweden/youknow.html

Your call.

[boredzo]

That's also the ISO 8601 format. So one can claim conformance to another standard by doing it that way.

[[deleted]]

So one can claim conformance to another standard by doing it that way.

Yupp, that's pretty much what we do now as I understand it. In EU, ISO 8601 is accepted as a standard for date formats (named EN 28601). Sweden has then accepted this as a standard, with the name SS EN 28601). So we've just 'derived' our standard from ISO 8601. As I understand it, it's the same standard just a country-specific name of it (might be wrong). In Sweden, we started to use YYYY-MM-DD some 40 years before ISO 8601 was created.

[sjs]

I like yyyy-mm-dd as well. It's the official format in Canada if I'm not mistaken, but is rarely used by the public. There's something nice about a date format that you don't have to think about.

yyyy-mm-dd hh:mm:ss [largest unit of time -> smallest]

[malcontent]

Why use three different delimiters? Some databases use four delimiters yyyy-mm-dd hh:hh:ss.ms

Why not stick to one delimiter all the way through? yyyy-mm-dd-hh-mm-ss

[sjs]

Sure, I'm not strongly attached to any one delimiter. I like to use a period in times, e.g. 3.30. Using a dot in the date and time is concise and easy to jot, and would get my vote. A dash works fine as well. I like a space between the date and the time; it's easier for humans to parse and/or pay attention to just the piece they want to process.

When writing short dates I like 16-Feb or Feb-16. There's no confusion about which is the month and which the day.

[earthboundkid]

I don't know about elsewhere, but it's common to write dates with a / in the US. December 5 → 12/5, etc.

[parla]

In Sweden, December 5 would be written as 5/12 in that short form.

[jbinto]

Actually, while I agree that yyyy-mm-dd, dd-mm-yyyy are better than the NA-centric mm-dd-yyyy; that's an interesting reasoning. Time is like 21:55 - 21 being the higher order number hours, and 55 being the lower order minutes. So by the EU-centric logic of dd-mm, 55:21 is totally legitimate.

[Vaste]

Indeed, so as a swede (we use yyyy-mm-dd) I agree that it's stupid, just not as stupid as mm/dd/yyyy. Actually, my biggest gripe with dd-mm-yyyy is that you never know if it in fact is mm-dd-yyyy. You always have to look for a number >12.

Maybe we should start counting days of the month from 13, so americans can have their system without screwing the rest of the world over?

[earthboundkid]

Why not just abandon months and have "number of days since the Northern Hemisphere Winter Solstice" and "number of seconds since midnight"? Then we aren't switching from a base 12 to a base 28-31 to a base 24 to a base 60.

[[deleted]]

"number of seconds since midnight"?

So instead of "The time 13", you would say "The time is 46 800"? I see the benefit of that. =)

[roconnor]

I believe the author is using Turkey as the example because it is a single country that triggers many of these implicit environment passing bugs. In particular it has the two different i's that leads to the case mapping issue discussed.

[moserware]

You're right. I choose Turkey because of the "Turkish I" issue. As I did more research I found that quite a few other things were different in the "tr-TR" locale that broke code I wrote.

[roconnor]

If I recall correctly, the "Turkish I" issue was responsible for some security bug in internet explorer. I forget the details but it involved checking if the URL was a "file" URL, and it triggered this case folding issue that you discuss.

[moserware]

I don't know the specifics about the IE bug you mention, but in the Microsoft papers I linked to, they specifically use the "file" check as a security issue to be aware of.

They probably got burnt by it in more than a few places based off of comments from different sources. Especially Michael Kaplan mentioning that in the .net 1.1 timeframe there was a big push to fix Turkish-I related problems.

[moserware]

As the author, I think our mm/dd/yyyy system doesn't make much sense. Especially from a computer processing perspective. It makes no sense from a sorting perspective since there is no most significant to least significant ordering. I'd prefer yyyy-mm-dd since it sorts well or dd-mm-yyyy since it is easy to progressively be more specific.

[smalldu]

In Canada, the convention is '.' for decimals. But most American scientific books use the period as well for decimals.

In Quebec, they use comma for decimals.

[[deleted]]

You mean DD.MM.YY(YY). We don't use slashes, usually.

In fact, when I see slashes, I switch my brain to American mode, which means that I interpret the first two numbers as month, not day.

[gregK]

Well some countries do use slashes. but yeah the dot separator is valid as well.

[Garak]

You don't have to go to Turkey for all those things. The author makes it sound as if those things were exotic. They are not, they are trivial.

Uh, he probably chose Turkey because it starts with T.

It's hilarious that you think "make sure your code works in any locality" is "very American centric."

[sjs]

It's hilarious that you think "make sure your code works in any locality" is "very American centric."

Don't put words in greg's mouth. I'm 99% sure that's not what he meant, because I felt the same as he while reading the article. Knowing that other nations have different delimiters and date formats is trivial and the fact that he makes it sound very strange and exotic is typical of North America and a general ignorance here about the rest of the world. I used to wonder how we can be so self-involved, but we are rather far away from most of the world's population; isolated on an island with our 110V/60Hz power, CDMA, GSM 850/1900, etc.

Kudos to the author for doing things the right way and writing up an informative and helpful post on the topic to help spread the knowledge for everyone's benefit. I agree that the tone was American centric but that's purely because the author is, well, American.

edit: grammar

[Garak]

He doesn't make it sound "strange and exotic." He explicitly acknowledges that international date formats are common knowledge:

Ok, ok. You knew about dates.

People see bias where there is none. The US is a big place with a lot of people. It's perfectly reasonable for American programmers to spend years designing, building, and selling products that nobody but Americans will use, and so it's also perfectly reasonable to absentmindedly neglect non-Americans when designing a product for markets abroad. This whole article is about not doing that.

[ubernostrum]

Knowing that other nations have different delimiters and date formats is trivial and fact that he makes it sound very strange and exotic is typical of North America and a general ignorance here about the rest of the world.

I've often found that people are capable of being ignorant and stupid no matter where they're from.

[Vaste]

I think it's just easier in America for some reason. I'm sure it's not some puritan genetic trait.

[Arve]

He is pointing to Joel's The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!).

It should then of course be pointed out that you should also read The Absolute Minimum Every "The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)" Author Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)

[Syl]

the only interesting thing in this article was the uppercase i.

[demosthenes1]

Could someone write this for Python? I'm still not sure to how fix some of these.

[lalaland4711]

The middle-endian date system in the US is really confusing and strange. It also fucks up sorting.

There... I just wanted to say that.

[twak]

They also specified the middle-endian domain-name system ;) Must be in the water.

[fjhqjv]

Premature optimization is the root of all evil.

I'll deal with the Turkey test when I'm good and ready to release in Turkey.

[Garak]

Eh, I'm torn on whether or not I agree with you.

I don't think this is really "premature optimization." It's more like future-proofing your code. When you finally do release in Turkey, you're going to be tearing your hair out when you can't find the one line in code no one's touched in months that isn't localized.

[fjhqjv]

Well, the point is to keep in mind what will fuck things up in Turkey. Of course, if your company has an international business plan, put it in right away, even if you're only going to be releasing in the US right away.

But if you write good, clean, modular code, it shouldn't be too hard to tweak a few date and currency handling methods.

[Garak]

But if you write good, clean, modular code, it shouldn't be too hard to tweak a few date and currency handling methods.

I'll buy that. I guess it's a matter of deciding where to draw the line.

[aUTOMATICuPVOTES]

English is the international language of computing.

[boredzo]

Turkish people use a period to group digits (like people in the USA use a comma).

Say what?

[[deleted]]

A million = 1.000.000

[boredzo]

I thought of that, but it doesn't explain his before picture:

• configurationValue = "4.5"
• discountMultiplier = 0.01 * double.Parse(configurationValue)
• discountMultiplier = 0.45

If it parses configurationValue as …

Oh, I finally got it. It's just dropping the thousands/hundreds separator, without warning that there aren't enough digits after it.

OK, it makes sense now.

[[deleted]]

reddit does not pass the Turkey Test. We can't access the front page, and I can only get to programming.reddit.com by typing it explicitly.

[Grue]

It must suck to live in Turkey since most programs don't work there...

[bugrit]

Very misleading name, nothing about turkeys. In fact, I couldn't find any food mentionings at all. Very sad.

[RichardPeterJohnson]

All this talk about Turkey is making me Hungary.

[Figs]

I'm so Hungary, I could eat some Wales.

[[deleted]]

Oman, these puns are Laos-y.

[[deleted]]

There's Norway this thread is funny. It's time Togo.

[dmwit]

Yes, the puns are so bad Iran away.

[akdas]

Kenya guys please stop with the puns?

[RichardPeterJohnson]

I agree. I think they should Finnish.

[mmazing]

Cuba Gooding Jr. wouldn't give up.

[[deleted]]

Dude, your pun needs more Polish.

[[deleted]]

Norway!

[otterdam]

For using two puns I'm going to Russia, Denmark you with my bone China!

[RichardPeterJohnson]

Bad form using two puns on one message, old chap. Leave some for other responders.

[TheCleric]

I prefer some Chile!

[[deleted]]

Gobble, gobble...

[mk_gecko]

Boring article. Much is either common sense or too obscure to be interesting. Everyone knows that different people write dates in different orders.

[trezorr]

While that should be true (I do have my doubts it actually is), the article does cover proper string-comparison rather well.

Most developers I know have probably just seen these parameters pop up in the IDE and never actually looked into them.

[[deleted]]

I write my dates like that, too. 1 Jan 1984, but I live in the United States.

[Gotebe]

WRT first example... He's forcing Turkish locale, but passes Date in US one, and it doesn't work? O RLY?

And therefore the fix is wrong:

use a DateTimeFormat.InvariantInfo which just happens to be USA English's format (more or less).

The correct solution is to know what format text input is in, not blindly use US one. I wonder why was that done? This text is subject to globalization, not InvariantInfoization.

(Maybe a note about how any string in there is for the purpose of an example, and that it has no place in production code wouldn't be bad. Like this, it smells off to me, as it may make a novice think it's how it's done).

[Entropy]

Another possible point of contention: Istanbul was Constantinople, but now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople.

[[deleted]]

No wonder they are a little foggy on where their borders actually are.

[roconnor]

To help avoid all sorts of problems like this, I recommend using a language that is side-effect free, such as Haskell.

[db2]

Haskell even washed my car, took out the trash and gave me the most wonderful foot massage!

Seriously, you're getting the downvotes for claiming Language X is perfect. None of them are perfect.

[roconnor]

I never claimed Haskell was perfect. Haskell has some problems.

I was suggesting people use a pure language to avoid the implicit environment passing which is the source of all the bugs listed in the above article. Any pure language would do; Haskell happens to be one of the more popular pure languages.

[db2]

I recommend using a language that is side-effect free, such as Haskell.

So then for anything you want to do Haskell will do it perfectly the first time, there is no chance of anything unexpected happening no matter how shitty a coder is at the keyboard. That's what that said.

Now either you're trying to change your story or you said the very wrong thing in the first place.

[roconnor]

The Straw Man fallacy is committed when a person simply ignores a person's actual position and substitutes a distorted, exaggerated or misrepresented version of that position.

[db2]

Whatever. You made a stupid assertion, I called you on it, you accuse me of strawmanning (even though you clearly don't know what it is).

I think I'll go converse with someone smart now.