Reiwa era enters the chat
Most of Japanese hates the arbitary currender year resetting at each new emperor enthronrment. The conversion is ass and no one knows when it changes (bound to emperor’s health) . Worst is its official year that govmt body accepts.
Real Estate Institute of Western Australia?
What do you mean you can’t translate instantly between era year and Gregorian year?
You are likely to only refer more than current era. If you’re writing govmet grant application, renewing licence or certificate, chances are you mention events hapenned in previous era. You look up table for when the previous era started and ended, which era said year falls into, then convert for each year, each era. Extra minutes wasted every time instead of simply writing in Gregorian year.
Don’t ask how they count the years tho
YYYY-MM-DD for everything digital, DD-MM-YYYY for everything IRL.
The truly enlightened interleave the numerals: YMD/YMD
The UK driving licence has birthdate as YMMDDY in the licence number. Totally uncrackable encryption.
YY/MM/DD SUPREMACY
Yeah but half the time is actually: EYY/MM/DD. Like this year is 令5/MM/DD.
And some years have two values, 2019 was both 平31, from 01/01 until 04/30, then 令1 from 05/01 onwards.
Is the kanji the name of the period the year belongs to or something? That looks interesting. Where can I find out more?
Yup, it’s a single character from the name of the era, and the era changes every time the emperor does.
Whenever their Emperor changes, the year starts with a new name(年号, which translates to name of year(s)). This time it’s 令和(reiwa). Before that it was 平成(heisei). It is very commonly used.
Wat? Like their alphabet, do the Japanese have some double system?
China does this normally. Either YYYY.MM.DD OR YYYY年MM月DD日
Yes, they have two date systems in common use. It’s only the year that changes though. And there’s no way to confuse the two, usually. If you write “2023” instead of “令5” it’s pretty obvious. I suppose there is a potential for confusion if one just writes a two-digit year though.
How about 0xYYYMDD or 0xYYYYMDD if you need years after 4095 for some reason.
Today is 0x7e7b16
Congrats, you made it even less practical. Why not make it binary if that’s the goal?
Nah. With binary, you can lose one hex digit AND the max year would be 2047 (11 bits year, 4 bits month, 5 bits day). What’s not to like about hex anyway?
Wouldn’t it just start over when it hit the max? Kinda like Ghandi being so peaceful he becomes a genocidal nutcase in Civilization?
Yes, although isn’t that an urban legend? Pretty sure I read that it was.
It was acknowledged as a bug by a dev. The value went from 0 to 255 and then started over. So 256 becomes 0. It’s basically a feature now.
What I read was that it never happened in the old versions and it wasn’t a bug in civ5, in that, it was a nod to the legend. But apparently Sid Meier said it didn’t happen in the original games.
EDIT: Here you go https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_Gandhi
Thing is, it did happen in the earlier games and I doubt Sid programmed all the games himself. They just put his sexy face on them like the Nintendo Quality Control stamp.
Pretty f’d up we can’t all even agree on this. Between this and DST, humanity is just pretty hopeless.
Hey… it sorts properly alphabetically
Only within the same century, which is an issue for those of us born last millennium (or managing systems from that time), and could be a real problem in 50-ish years when we could get the first duplicates.
Better to stick with YYYY-MM-DD for alphabetical sorting
*ASCIIbetically. The alphabet doesn’t know digits.
YYYY-MM-DD is the only acceptable date format, as commanded by ISO 8601.
The truth. Amen
Is that why the military uses that format?
In a GMP laboratory it’s 22NOV2023 no ambiguity.
In many of them but not all, because it’s become convention and has been enshrined in their documentation policies. cGMP just requires that your quality management system has a policy in place that specifies how to document the date, and when exceptions are allowed (for instance, data printouts where YYYY-MM-DD is often the default).
It’s also the reason some labs require you to initial/date every page of printed data, and some only require you to initial/date the first and/or last page. I’ve seen FDA auditors be okay with both, as long as you can justify it with something like: our documentation policy defines the printout as a copy of the original data, and the original data as what’s stored on machine memory with electronic signature; versus: our documentation policy defines the original signed/dated data printout as the original data. In any case, it still has to follow 21 CFR part 11 requirements for electronic records & signatures, where the only date predicate rule example they give is 58.130(e), which itself is broad and only applies to non-clinical lab studies. It’s notable that the date format 21 CFR 11 itself uses is actually Month D, YYYY, with no zero padding on the day.
And if you don’t have IQ/OQ/PQ documentation showing how you locked down and validated the software’s ability to maintain an audit trail you can’t even use electronic records (or signatures).
Yep, you can easily sort it just because of the ordering. It’s a full standard
No. No you can’t.
ISO 8601, while great, has too many formats. May I introduce RFC 3339 instead?
That is what I love so much about standards: there are so many to choose from.
Huh, I’ve never noticed how much bloat was in ISO 8601. I think when most people refer to it, we’re specifically referring to the date (optionally with time) format that is shared with RFC 3339, namely 2023-11-22T20:00:18-05:00 (etc). And perhaps some fuzziness for what separates date and time.
deleted by creator
Largest to smallest unit of time. It just makes sense.
Sorting by date would be so much better with yyyymmdd .
For file names, absolutely.
When I’m asking what date it is I typically know the current year.Well la-tee-dah, look at mister not-shitfaced-every-day here, bragging like a big man
I can lie under the table, puking my guts out and still remember the year.
You need more training, son.
Except the information is given least to most important, making verbal abbreviation difficult. Works great for file names though.
There’s this really cool shorthand where you drop the year because it seldom changes. It’s called MM-DD
Yeah and if you need to know what year, you can just add it to the end like this MM-DD-YY.
MM-DD-YY is the worst abomination I’ve seen yet
12-04-08
good luck figuring out what that is
Wow it’s my exact birthday. Good luck figuring out my age.
Had a coworker who used MMDDYY with no dashes. Unless you knew it was very hard to figure out, since it could also just be a number that happened to be 6 digits, too. At least YYYY-MM-DD looks like a date generally.
“I can reuse this old function if I just monkey-patch this other class to work with it, no one will have any issues understanding what’s going on”
Edit: Thought this was the programmerhumor community. For context: A monkey-patch is when you write code that changes the behaviour of some completely different code when it is running, thus making its inner workings completely incomprehensible to the poor programmer using or reading your code.
YYYY-MM-DD:HH:MM:SS
This, but all run together.
I write files/reports to disk a lot from scripts, so that’s my preferred format.
I just go for a unix timestamp and use terminal/filemanager to sort by or display the datetime
Are you talking epoch? I don’t care for that mainly because it’s not human readable. I see the use for it, but I struggle with it in practical use.
Yep. I mostly like datetimes for simple sorting. If it needs to be human readable iso is the way to go tho.
Funny thing, in ISO 8601 date isn’t separated by colon. The format is “YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS+hh:mm”. Date is separated by “-”, time is separated by “:”, date and time are separated by “T” (which is the bit that a lot of people miss). Time zone indicator can also be just “Z” for UTC. Many of these can be omitted if dealing with lesser precision (e.g. HH:MM is a valid timestamp, YYYY-MM is a valid datestamp if referring to just a month). (OK so apparently if you really want to split hairs, timestamps are supposed to be THH:MM etc. Now that’s a thing I’ve never seen anyone use.) Separators can also be omitted though that’s apparently not recommended if quick human legibility is of concern. There’s also YYYY-Wxx for week numbers.
YYYY-MM-DD:HH:MM:SS+TZ
RFC3339! It’s like ISO8601, but good!
YYYY-MM-DDTHH:MM:SS.SSSSSSSSSZ
I love the nanosecond format! I was playing with the date command earlier and came across this.
Glad I can count my own country, Lithuania, among the enlightened.
EDIT: Source of the picture: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Date_format_by_country_NEW.svg
Which color is which?
(This doesn’t consider the separator) Cyan - DD/MM/YY Magenta - MM/DD/YY Yellow - YY/MM/DD The other ones are mixes of those two colors, so e.g. the US is MM/DD/YY and YY/MM/DD (apparently).
Also just noticed I didn’t attribute this picture, I’ll edit my comment.
Canada threw up their hands and said, “Fuck it, I don’t care, use whatever date format you like.”
We are ridiculously inconsistent in Canada. I’ve seen all 3 of the most popular formats here (2023-11-22, 11/22/2023, and 22/11/2023) in similarish amounts. Government forms seem to be increasingly using RFC 3339 dates, but even they aren’t entirely onboard.
where’s that? somewhere in africa?
/s because apparently it’s not implied
Lithuania is one of the Baltic States, conveniently squished between Russia & Belarus to the east and the sea to the west. Across that sea is Sweden. You’ll usually see three countries be the parts of this set. Lithuania is the southernmost of these three.
Soo… yes to being in Africa?
/s
Are you from the US? This is a legit question…
I seem to have dropped my /s. But yes.
If you have years of files named similarly with the date, you will love the ISO standard and how it keeps things sorted and easy to read.
I have autohotkey configured to insert the current date in ISO 8601 format into my filenames on keyboard shortcut for just this reason. So organized. So pure.
Much date. Very logic.
Holy shit teach me your ways how do I do that
Download Autohotkey, and create a new script. Paste these shortcuts into the script and restart the script:
#NoEnv ; Recommended for performance and compatibility with future AutoHotkey releases.
; #Warn ; Enable warnings to assist with detecting common errors.
SendMode Input ; Recommended for new scripts due to its superior speed and reliability.
SetWorkingDir %A_ScriptDir% ; Ensures a consistent starting directory.
:R*?:ddd::
FormatTime, CurrentDateTime, yyyy-MM-dd
SendInput %CurrentDateTime%
return
:R*?:dtt::
FormatTime, CurrentDateTime, yyMMddHHmm
SendInput %CurrentDateTime%
Return
Now, if you type ‘ddd’ on your keyboard, the current date will be typed out, eg ‘2023-11-23’.
If you type ‘dtt’ tgen the datetime stamp will be typed out in YYMMDDhhmm format, eg 2311231012
There are so many cool things you van do with AHK to make your work more productive. For example, rather tgan typing your email address a billion times, add the shortcut:
And then you can type ‘add1’ and hit space, and your email address will be typed out in full. Of course, the string ‘add1’ can be whatever you want.
I love you.
💕
Are you familiar with AHK at all?
Nope not yet
It’s alphabetically sortable too. Name backups like this.
“There shall be no other date formats before ISO8601. Remember this format and keep it as the system default”
The right answer is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
DD/MM/YY and YY/MM/DD are the only acceptable ones IMO. Throwing a DD in between YY and MM is just weird since days move by faster so they should be at one of the ends and since YY moves the slowest it should be on the other end.
Should just burn it all down and do. MM/YY/DD
I grew up with DD.MM.YYYY. But I think, MM/DD makes sense in everyday usage. You don’t often need to specify dates with year accuracy. “Jane’s prom is on 7th September” – it’s obvious which year is meant. Then it’s sensible to start with the larger unit, MM, instead of DD.
Even in writing you see that the year is always given like an afterthought: “7th September**,** 2023“.
So when you say it out loud you say 7th September, and not September 7th?
I say “The 7th of September” because I was taught British English in school.
Americans still use it in rare cases, like the Fourth of July
I hope you mean YYYY, not just YY
The only reason they place month as first is because it is fits how dates are read in English, but that’s not a good reason to keep that format.
You only think it fits with how it’s read in English because that’s how you grew up saying it so it sounds natural to you. Your experience is not universal, and is in fact, a minority.
It’s how it is read in English (simplified) aka american english. Brittish english doesn’t do this nonsense, the talk in the correct format (first of january etc.).
(I’m sorry if i made some mistakes, english is my second language)
Japan is YYYY-MM-DD, but when we talk about dates where a year is unneeded, we just cut it off which leaves it in the US standard format of MM-DD, much to the annoyance of non-US foreigners living here.
If you use DD/MM/YYYY, dumb sorting algorithms will put all of the 1sts of every month together, all of the 2nds of every month together, etc. That doesn’t seem very useful unless you’re trying to identify monthly trends, which is fundamentally flawed as things like the number of days in the month or which day of the week a date falls on can significantly disrupt those trends.
With MM/DD/YY, the only issue is multiple years being grouped together. Which may be what you want, especially if the dates are indicating cumulative totals. Depending on the data structure, years are often sorted out separately anyways.
YYYY/MM/DD is definitely the best for sorting. However, the year is often the least important piece in data analysis. Because often the dataset is looking at either “this year” or “the last 12 months”. So the user’s eyes need to just ignore the first 5 characters, which is not very efficient.
If you’re using a tool that knows days vs months vs years that can help, but you can run into compatibility issues when trying to move things around.
The ugly truth no one wants to admit on these conversations is that these formats are tools. Some are better suited to certain jobs than others.
I’m not kidding when I ask: are there really a lot of people using MM/DD/YYYY??
Pretty much every American I’ve ever met. Dates on drivers license, bank info, etc - all in MM/DD/YYYY … or even just MM/DD/YY
I regularly confuse people with YYYY-MM-DD
I think most Americans do. Or at least it was taught that way in school when I was growing up. Maybe it’s because of the way we speak dates, like “October 23rd” or “May 9th, 2005”.
Regardless, the only true way to write dates is YYYY-MM-DD.
Thanks!
Almost 350 million of us morons down south of you.
Using a different date format that means the exact same thing anyway does not make you a moron.
But there are a lot of other things that do 👈😎👈
My favourite thing is that files are sorted automatically by date if you use yyyy-mm-dd. Sometimes there are just practical reasons.
🤣
It’s 1700663620 now.
It makes sense to either go general to specific or specific to general. MM-DD-YYYY is neither.