I propose that we amend the ISO to require the days of the week be named after their etymological roots in that language.
English Days of the Week:
Day of the Sun
Day of the Moon
Day of Týr
Day of Odin
Day of Thor
Day of Frēa
Day of SaturnImagine dating a meeting, "Day of Odin, May 7, 2025." Imagine a store receipt that says, "Day of Thor, June 5, 2025." Imagine telling a friend, "July 4th falls on a Day of Frēa this year!"
THIS IS WHAT WE COULD HAVE. THIS IS WHAT WE HAVE LOST. THIS IS WHAT WAS STOLEN FROM US.
We could bring it back. We could make this the norm. We could make this real. We could summon this bit of ancient magic back into our world. Let's remember what we actually named these days for! BRING BACK THE DAY OF THOR!
2013-02-27 is a weird way of writing 1361923200
The sane way of dealing with it is to use UTC everywhere internally and push local time and local formatting up to the user facing bits. And if you move time around as a string (e.g. JSON) then use ISO 8601 since most languages have time / cron APIs that can process it. Often doesn't happen that way though...
Issue: there are 27 different ways of writing a date.
Engineers: We most make a common standard that is unambiguous, easy to understand and can replace all of these.
Issue: there are 28 different ways of writing a date.
Joke aside, I really think the iso standard for dates is the superior one!
2013-02-27 = 1984
There are several people in the comments saying they have to use 27 Feb 2013 because they work with people all over the world. I’m really confused - what does that solve that 2013-02-13 does not? I know that not every language spells months the English way so “Dec” or “May” aren’t universal. Is there some country that regularly puts year day month that would break using ISO 8601 or RFC 3339?
I agree with the ISO approach, but unfortunately without mainstream adoption in a majority of countries it's just another standard.
Is that the same guy who wrote Standards? tsk, tsk.
This is the way.
In the last company I work for, the department was created from zero, and my boss just let me take all the technical decisions so from the begging everything was wrote in ISO-8601. When I left it was just the way it was, if you try to use any other date format anywhere something is going to give you an error.
RFC-3336
I figured there were problems with existing calendars, so I created a new one to supersede all others. That reminds me, though: I need to declare the "official" format for the calendar, to avoid all this nonsense.
I see a window of opportunity, here. Normally, there's no chance for any calendar revision to succeed in adoption; however, I think if I use the right words with the President, I could get it pushed into adoption by fiat. Y'all had best start learning my new calendar to get ahead of everyone else.
Note for the humorously disadvantaged: the Saturnalia Calendar is a mechanism through which I'm playing with a new (to me) programming language. I am under no disillusion that anyone else will see the obvious advantages and clear superiority of the Saturnalia Calendar, much less adopt it. And no comments from the peanut gallery about the name! What, did you expect me to actually spend time thinking of a catchy name when a perfectly good, mostly unused one already existed?
I regularly work with Americans, Canadians, and Europeans. So many times each group defaults to their own format and mistakes occur I gave up on all the formats listed by OP. If i have to write a date in correspondence its like: Feb 27th 2013. No ambiguity. No one has ever challenged me on it either. It is universally understood.
You know, I used to think ISO 8601 was just a boring technical standard for writing dates. But now I see it’s clearly the first step in a grand master plan! First, they make us write the year first, then the month, then the day-suddenly, our beloved 17.05.2025 turns into 2025-05-17. My birthday now looks like a WiFi password, and my calendar feels like a math equation.
But it doesn’t stop there. Today it’s the date format, tomorrow we’ll all be reading from right to left, and before you know it, our keyboards will be rearranged so QWERTY is replaced with mysterious squiggles and dots. Imagine the panic:
“First they came for our dates, then they came for our keyboards!”
At this rate, I’ll be drinking mint tea instead of coffee, my local kebab shop will start offering lutefisk shawarma, and Siri will only answer to “Inshallah.” The right-wing tabloids will have a field day:
“Western Civilization in Peril: Our Months and Days Held Hostage!”
But let’s be honest-if the worst thing that happens is we finally all agree on how to write today’s date, maybe world peace isn’t so far off. Until then, I’ll be over here, clutching my calendar and practicing my right-to-left reading skills… just in case.
(Don’t worry,this was just a joke! No offense intended-unless you’re a die-hard fan of confusing date formats, in which case, may the ISO be ever in your favor!)
Peace!
I’m not a computer and this isn’t work so I’m gonna just use my confusing date format.
@m_f@discuss.online this might be applicable to the farside as well
That format near the cat's tail should have used hue to differentiate year/month/day...
Upset we didn't get a "Half a score, two years, two months, and four days ago..."
Amen. Shout it from the rooftops!
Disregard ISO8601. Acquire RFC3339. You can leave off the T if you want to, or replace Z with
+00:00.Working for a global clinical research company, DD-Mmm-YYYY is the easiest for everyone to understand and be on the same page. It's bad enough identifying which date you're capturing in metadata without also trying to juggle multiple date formats.
I was going to comain until I realized that the fprmat is the one that I prefer.
This format can fuck off. I prefer the unambiguous format 2FEB2013.
Checkmate, date snobs.
And yes, nations are free to use their appropriate abbreviations for the months.
Ohh, dashes.
Stupid smarch 2nd
As long as the month comes before the day I can get behind it.
I see he paid the Internet Cat Tax
