this post was submitted on 12 Dec 2023
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Hot take: going from biggest to smallest unit is best
go away robot with your beep boop propaganda humans are supreme and not computers we aren't saying our dates like a file manager
It's literally the international standard
2023-12-12T08:52:02Z
If you want a properly self-organising file structure, going by least changing unit to most changing unit is absolutely the correct way to go
For sorting files by date (yyyy/mm/dd), sure, but for keeping track of what date it is today, dd/mm/yyyy is the only right way.
Ah, the "human scale" fahrenheit argument.
Not really, no. Some things are best for one thing, others are best for another, and Fahrenheit is ridiculous under all circumstances.
That's also the argument for metric, scaling by 10's is easy for us to calculate because we have 10 fingers
Why?
The first one is best for sorting files because it's basically like a Drive>Directory>Subdirectory structure, which makes things easy to seperate and find in a large amount of data.
Conversely, when you're keeping track of what day it is today, what you're doing this week etc, it's much more helpful to have the days first in mind because they're more relevant for THAT than what year it is.
You can just do mm/dd or even just dd in that case, you don’t need the year
That makes about as much sense as measuring travel distance in smoots.
No it isnt. We arent computers, we are humans. In most uses, the year is the least relevant information for us. The most important information is the day, which should be in front. And computers can be programmed to understand the date in whichever format we want.
If the year isn’t important than why are you saying it at all
Also it’s not yyyy/mm/dd for computer sake, it’s most convenient for humans because it has the most variations. If you’re searching through 100 years of records then finding the year first is most convenient because you’ve ruled out 99%. For computers it doesn’t really matter because they can go through all the data much quicker than we can
Calling hogwash on this one. Is it more important that an event took place in 1992, or that it took place on the 12th?
How often do you use the year when talking about dates? Does your boss say "i need this done by 2023-12-22"? For day to day use, the day is the most relevant info. The year and even the month is often implied.
For day to day use within the current month the day is the most important detail. Outside of that, it's largely irrelevant.
ISO8601
I agree, so easy to sort stuff like that. :)
I prefer YYYY MM DD myself, and I am assuming that the US operates along weird similar logic but just considers the year irrelevant for most dates, tacking it on at the end instead when the year needs to be mentioned so that the unstated/assumed dates which omit the year still begin the same way.
I think that's too much thinking, I'm pretty sure it's simpler than that. North Americans say "December Twelfth" or "May Forth" or "March Fourteenth" rather than "The Fourteenth of March".
So they go "March -> 3", "Fourteenth -> 14", and you get "3/14" that you can read from left to right as "March Fourteenth". That's about it, I'm pretty sure.
And so long as everyone agrees which one comes first it's not ambiguous. Of course, everyone doesn't agree, and there are logical reasons to pick the others, but this one is simply in reading order.
Like RFC 3339?
ISO8601 for the win
2023-12-12
Nah
ISO8601 is better for programming and scripting
RFC3339 is for when I'm feeling fancy
i think they mean YYYY/MM/DD
Oops misread
The real hot take is lighting up the controversy with asking why they chose the skin tones. Then you talk about dog whistles.
That’s how it’s done in Canada