It's 4.3.21
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Not really, there are more days than there are months and there are more years than there are days.
2021 > 31 > 12
in terms of set size, Europe goes second largest, smallest, largest
Not really lol
Like, when I explain YYYYMMDD, I say "biggest to smallest," and reverse for DDMMYYYY. For MMDDYYYY it's "well this is how it's said in America, and there are situations where someone will want to know the month more than the day"
My bad, I made my point very badly.
If I give you a date in the american format, you have to read the last part (the year) to situate yourself in time, then the first part to situate yourself in the year, then the middle part to situate yourself in the month. You have to parse the date three times because you keep jumping between the elements of the date.
Both ISO and european just go through the date one element at a time, in the order they are written (in reverse for european, which is kinda dumb, yeah).
That's the same reason we don't write mm:ss:hh.
1) It isn't useless, it's just bottom up. Less usefull, not useless.
2) True, consistency isn't a measure of usefulness. Inconsistency is a measure of uselessness though.
A day is shorter than a month as time unit, ergo it is a smaller element of time.
Or is a minute bigger than an hour for you?
Yes but that's kind of useless since it breaks all lexical sorting
Prefer yyyy:mm:dd because you can extend it to yyyy:mm:dd:hh:mm:ss and maintain sortability and you can increase granularity as much as you need to. dd:mm:yyyy is fine too but a bit weird. mm:dd:yyyy is just yankee nonsense.
Real talk, we should get rid of time zones. Everyone in a global world should be on UTC+0 24-h time to make international coordination simpler. Reject arbitrary geographic temporal segregation, embrace universal time.
Real talk, we should get rid of time zones. Everyone in a global world should be on UTC+0 24-h time to make international coordination simpler. Reject arbitrary geographic temporal segregation, embrace universal time.
if you sort files by DD/MM/YYYY
all files will be go, 1st of Jan, 1st of Feb, 1st of Mar, ..., 1st of December, 2nd of Jan, 2nd of Feb, 2nd of Mar, ..., so on and so forth
Why the hell would one care about day first?
MM/DD/YYYY and YYYY/MM/DD are both useful since they build lexically sorted units.
Literally a toddler would be able to look at a numerical date and translate it to words for you without sparing an ounce of brain power. It's something you learn as soon as you learn to read and then just know it by intstinct going forward. Maybe the other formats are simpler if you're trying to teach them to a fucking alien or something sure, as if an alien couldn't learn all three in a second regardless
American dates are all consistently MM/DD/YYYY. They share the same level of consistency between dates that the other formats do. Small to large is completely external to that and gives you nothing.
Yo, sorry, I didn't realize how passionately you felt about MMDDYYYY, didn't mean to insult it so hard
Why the hell would anyone care about the month first?
You HAVE to sort by year, because it is the biggest time unit.
You say this to mugurumakensei but not a A.By...? Yup, no bias here at all folks
Yeah yeah yeah we get it you're too cool for this conversation, thanks for your contribution
Dawg you're getting angry that I'm criticizing a date format, it's not that big a deal
Right. The logic why you put month before day on one hand, and why you put the year at the end on the other end, is not consistent though.
The date FORMAT is not consistent, I sure hope you USE it consistently in the states, else any date exchange would be impossible.
Not really, so long as the relative order of MM/DD is preserved, you can sort dates. You can't do so if you go with some format that's DD/MM
Either go from biggest to smallest like YYYYMMDD or if you must from smallest to biggest DDMMYYYY but the American way is incredibly messy and has caused me a lot of frustration in software.
My problem isn't month before day it's the non sensicleness of putting the year at the end still. All regions should adopt that YYYYMMDD not just the US.
My problem isn't month before day it's the non sensicleness of putting the year at the end still. All regions should adopt that YYYYMMDD not just the US.
But then I'd get all january data first, regardless of the year, which is... in 99% of the cases useless.
There is no reason to stick to a rule that provides no utility. We are consistent in our "inconsistency". I'm arguing that smallest to largest isn't something worth abiding to in the first place, and that the alternative actually offers different benefits, that are more useful on the whole.
Still more useful than DD/MM/YYYY which gives me the first of every day of every month for ever year followed by the second of every month of every year and so on and so forth. The year issue can be resolved with MM/DD case by just putting data in folders named after years
Ok, I'm all ears: what's the benefit of MM/DD/YYYY over YYYY/MM/DD?
(as a side note, bottom up and top down are almost always the right choice to do something)
Both are useless for sorting. At least the parsing of the euro format is logical, which the american one isn't.
And the DD/MM issue can be resolved by just putting data in folders by month.
These threads always make me laugh when the people show up and act like numbers don't have context. Yes the number 31 is bigger than 12 but numbers have context, in this case time. The idea that people can't understand that 31 days is less time than 12 months is always something that makes me laugh.
As for America's system, it's too hard to convince them otherwise at this point. The whole rest of the world does it differently but apparently everyone else is wrong but their one nation. There are reasons for them it may makes sense but those reasons never actually cause issues in other nations but somehow would in the usa. I mean they would cause issues now because it's the way they've done it for so long but it always makes me laugh when people in the usa think somehow other countries can't function because their date system would make it impossible to sort files on a computer.
As for the reason of having to talk to people or send letters and shit, it would make more sense in a global world with international conversations non stop to maybe handle it the same way everyone else would as opposed to trying to argue everyone else is wrong. It doesn't matter what logic you throw out about if it's wrong or right. The rest of the world has decided on a system, the usa has decided everyone else is wrong and won't change to a standard the world accepts even if that's the case.
As for America's system, it's too hard to convince them otherwise at this point. The whole rest of the world does it differently but apparently everyone else is wrong but their one nation. There are reasons for them it may makes sense but those reasons never actually cause issues in other nations but somehow would in the usa. I mean they would cause issues now because it's the way they've done it for so long but it always makes me laugh when people in the usa think somehow other countries can't function because their date system would make it impossible to sort files on a computer.
As for the reason of having to talk to people or send letters and shit, it would make more sense in a global world with international conversations non stop to maybe handle it the same way everyone else would as opposed to trying to argue everyone else is wrong. It doesn't matter what logic you throw out about if it's wrong or right. The rest of the world has decided on a system, the usa has decided everyone else is wrong and won't change to a standard the world accepts even if that's the case.
i don't think anybody's argued that. YYYY-MM-DD should be the only format as far as I'm concerned. There's just a ton of benefits of MM/DD/YYYY over European format.
1. logically grouped my month. This is useful for ledgers and expense filing.
2. If you organize data to where it's always bucketed by year, the data can be sorted by prefixing the name with MM-DD
3. It organizes the data based on how large the set of valid values are.
Now you'd have to put those month files into top level folders based on Year in order to have useful data for a year. At that point, you've done your folder structure by YYYY-MM-DD to compensate for the weakness of DD-MM-YYYY
Right, Euro format is horrible for sorting. American format is only slightly less horrible, namely when your data only concerns one year.
ISO should be used for sorting period.
Then we agree on something.
When did I claim that MM/DD/YYYY was better than YYYY/MM/DD? I'm only claiming that it's better than DD/MM/YYYY.
Here is why small to large or vice versa is arbitrary, by the way: I could make up whatever rule I want for MM/DD/YYYY. For example, MM maxes out at 12, DD maxes out at 31 and YYYY maxes out at 9999, so they're ordered by their limits! By that logic, the American format is consistent while the other formats are not. But obviously this is stupid. So why is ordering by small to large any less stupid? Why should dates arbitrarily be beholden to that rule, when it's completely irrelevant to the information they're trying to convey?
Right, if you want to ignore what the date is used for.
A date's sole purpose is to inform you where you are in time.
To place yourself somewhere, the easiest way to do it (and how humans and algorithm do it 99% of the time) is either bottom up or top down. You'll almost always do this any time you have to order things, or find something.
That's why. Because it is the most effective way to convey the information you want to convey, and the way you convey any other information (like the time):
If I give you a date in the american format, you have to read the last part (the year) to situate yourself in time, then the first part to situate yourself in the year, then the middle part to situate yourself in the month. You have to parse the date three times because you keep jumping between the elements of the date.
In the (not perfect by any way) european way, you first get the place in the month. If you don't know the month, the month is then given, same for the year, all in logical, chronological order (bottom up).
In ISO you zoom into the current date (top down).
So I'll rather ask you the inverse question: what makes dates so special that you shouldn't order them liek you order every single other thing in your life?
I've already given my reasoning for why month before day is more useful for positioning yourself in time. Yes, I agree that YYYY/MM/DD is technically the best. But MM/DD/YYYY is the next best.
But like, people don't generally say "let's hang out on the 20th" unless they're saying this month or there's prior context for why they didn't say the month. It's a solution to a problem that doesn't really exist.
Not sure how this is a counterpoint to what I said. If there's not enough context to deduce the month, then in that scenario the month is more important and it should come first. If there is enough context, then you're omitting the month anyway and don't have to write either one first.
Also sorry about before, I didn't realize that you were the person mugurumakensei was originally quoting when I quoted you. What I meant to say was, you can't tell someone that tells you "Actually we say January 1st" to expand their horizons when you were the one that first said "Actually we say 1st of January". Double standards.
My point is that people don't generally be vague about the month unless there's prior context or it's the month they're in. The scenario where someone says "the 20th" in April to mean June without any prior context to establish that is extremely rare
Mugurumakensei said people, not we, implying that "1st of January" is not a thing people say
