this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 hours ago

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!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 hours ago

2013-02-27 = 1984

[–] [email protected] 8 points 6 hours ago

I agree with the ISO approach, but unfortunately without mainstream adoption in a majority of countries it's just another standard.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 hours ago

2013-02-27 is a weird way of writing 1361923200

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 hours ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 hours ago (1 children)

@m_[email protected] this might be applicable to the farside as well

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

Do you mean the post titles? I've been using the same format as was used since before I took over posting, but if people want ISO format that works for me

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 hours ago

This is the way.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 15 hours ago (6 children)

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...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 hour ago

The BEST way is to use the number of seconds after the J2000 epoch (The Gregorian date January 1, 2000, at 12:00 Terrestrial Time)

[–] [email protected] 7 points 13 hours ago

Generally yes, that's the way to do it, but there are plenty of times where you need to recreate the time zone something was created for, which means additionally storing the time zone information.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 13 hours ago

Definitely. If your servers aren't using UTC, then when you're trying to sync data between different timezones, you're making it harder for yourself.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago

This is what I try to do in the few apps I've written that had to deal with dates and times

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

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 Saturn

Imagine 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!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 13 hours ago

That would work better if Latin wasn't there before English. Mars Victor!

[–] [email protected] 22 points 18 hours ago (2 children)

Where I live, "DD. MM. YYYY" is the standard but some old tombstones use

first two digits of year, then a "proper" (horizontal-bar) fraction of DD/MM, then second two digits of year

[–] [email protected] 15 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Do you know why one would ever do that? 20(02/05)25 feels like the "Don't Dead Open Inside" of dates.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 hours ago

Which is exactly why they're used on tombstones. See, the world makes sense after all!

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 19 hours ago* (last edited 19 hours ago)

ISO 8601 allows all kinds of crazy time stamps. RFC 3339 is much nicer and simpler, and the sweet spot is at the intersection of ISO 8601 and RFC 3339.

Then again, ISO 8601 contains some nice things that RFC 3339 does not, like ranges and durations, recurrences...

https://ijmacd.github.io/rfc3339-iso8601/

[–] [email protected] 0 points 7 hours ago

I was going to comain until I realized that the fprmat is the one that I prefer.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 1 day ago (2 children)

I am a big fan of iso 8601, I just wish it was possible to write more dates than February 27th, 2013 with it

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 14 hours ago (1 children)

As a Hungarian, I approve.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 9 hours ago

As an American, I can't get people in my team to standardize their email signatures with correct spelling.

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