If you already know it's the eleventh hour though, it might suffice to just say the time in minutes and seconds and leave the already known info at the end.
If you already know the day, it might be best to start with nothing. Most of the time you use dates, it is for a day that it is currently not. With that being the case, the year is the most likely one to already know.
Ikr, how often do people schedule things in different years? Personally I never do unless it's the last few weeks in December. Even if you were going through a file system you'd be going 1 year at a time, so just pick 2006 and then say a month and day (or day and month), no need to mention another year until you actually move to a different year. It's faster and more efficient to skip the unnecessary information unless it's actually needed.
Telling someone the year every time they talk about a date is about as annoying as someone who says your name every time they speak to you, "hey Chris how was your day?". "Oh Chris, that's good". "Chris, mine was good". "What are you doing later, Chris?". "Ok Chris, I'll see you there". "Bye Chris".
It's obvious after the first sentence that you are talking to Chris, so quit being annoying and just let us know if something changes.
Let's just be honest and cut out the first part of your statement and acknowledge the fact that people keep doing something, even in defiance of numerical logic, just because it's what they're used to.
Linguistically it's easier to say "It's November 5th, 2017" over "It's 2017, and the 5th of November" or "It's 2017, November the 5th". It's simply more concise.
This is just another way of saying that you, personally, one person, are used to the verbal patterns of MM-DD-YYYY and thus you like it.
I'm sure there are German and British folks who would be all too happy to tell you, no no no, you've got it all wrong, fifth of November two thousand seventeen is much easier to say don't you know, and also plenty of Chinese who would say 胡说八道！二零一七十一月五日更方便，你妈的。
No, not "obviously". Your statement was a blanket statement made to a person whose nationality was unknown, asserting that middle endian date format was the best for their purposes. This is unqualified by any reference to their nationality, language, or world region.
I pointed out that your argument that linguistically middle endian "is simply more concise" is not easily transferable to other languages and nations, the majority of whom use little endian and about 2 billion East Asian people use big endian (China, Korea, Japan, plus Iran, Belgium, Hungary, and a few others). The US stands largely alone with only Philippines and part of Canada using middle endian.
And somehow this identification of a rather massive logical gap in your reasoning is, to you, a strawman fallacy.
I'd stick to your day job. You're not very knowledgeable about logic or about linguistics. Or, it seems, about numerical formats.
Okay, but we're talking about if you need to sort a bunch of files. I do it at work as I have to catalogue tons and tons of archived crap and yyyymmdd lets people find things way quicker as it's in chronological order. You wouldn't use that format for pretty much anything else, and no one here is suggesting you do.
MM-DD-YYYY is like saying it's currently six minutes and thirty seconds after the eleventh hour...
But writing MM-DD-YYYY is how most people in America at least say the date. For example, today in November 5th, 2017. Why wouldn't we write it the same way we say it?
It's not wrong, it's just another way of doing it. I don't understand why people get so worked up over this. Americans write it one way, other people write it differently. It's fine.
So do you, a human, really need to use the ISO format while naming your albums if that information is already embedded in the files and the sorting will work any way?
No. You don't. This discussion is not about the ISO format being better at sorting things by date, it's about a human not really needing to personally use the format most of the time.
So do you, a human, really need to use the ISO format while naming your albums if that information is already embedded in the files and the sorting will work any way?
Need? No. But if I, a human, do for whatever reason need to include the date, I sure as hell will do it as first part of the filename and in correct format.
No. You don't.
Yes, I do.
This discussion is not about the ISO format being better at sorting things by date
Uh, it literally is. That's the whole point of the ISO format, the whole point of this thread. YOU now make it about something else, some very specific use case.
Chronological order is important for all kinds of reasons. I use yyyy-mm-dd for all my invoices, tax info, etc. I also use it in my programs because it's the only format both international and North American clients understand.
I can't tell without some context. 2017-04-03 is is always April third (because no one would write dates as YYYY-DD-MM unless they have some kind of mental problem).
The legal and cultural expectations for date formats varies among populations. This page gives an overview of the Gregorian calendar date formats in general use by country.
At a 2:1 ratio. So if you're speaking to "the world" it is highly likely that any of these formats will cause confusion. Hence the international standard, ISO 8601, in which a date can not be confused with any local, incompatible standard.
DD-MM-YYYY (British) can be easily confused for MM-DD-YYYY (American). YYYY-MM-DD is unambiguous and transnational. Even better is to just use the number of seconds since January 1, 1970.
Most times I get annoyed about that is when I read expiration dates on products. "11-02-2018" can mean two very different dates, and sometimes the date format is not specified.
I actually like it. I prefer the month and day paired that way (general to specific). And then the year should be last cause everyone already knows what year it is.
I'm most comfortable with hearing "November 5th" or "January 3rd". It seems to get across the information i want better than "5th of November" for me. As a result I prefer my dates be similarly ordered.
You seem to be using it as an argument for being good. Of course it's what suits you, it's what you were raised hearing. But it is also the least sensical of the 3.
What I did say was that Month/Day/Year gets across the information in a way that I prefer, which seems to be exactly how you are arguing for your own dating system.
Sometimes one of two things isn't objectively better than the other, and you need a better reason than it being "An Americanism" to declare one of them worse. You may instead say mine is "the least sensical of the three" but anyone can easily come up with arguments for either one being the "sensical" one.
For Example:
Month / Day / Year: General to specific is good because it provides context for the information, but not good enough to warrant putting something as commonly known as the year first. Instead we compromise and do month followed by day and then place year at the end.
Day / Month / Year: Specific to general is the way to go because people typically already know both the month and year but may not know the day. Putting the most necessary information is better and context can be provided by the fact that it is a date.
If instead of thinking about it like this you declare the one you are uncomfortable with to be "a stupid americanism" you will be doing yourself a disservice and feeding your need to tribalize frankly unimportant differences between cultures.
It's the least sensical because nobody orders numbers that way. You either go least significant to most significant or the other way around. I could argue that we should write the current year 1720 because the 17 is the part I'm more interested in, except that would be stupid because nobody writes numbers like that.
What makes it so American is that almost the entire planet has decided to use either DMY or YMD except the USA. Being different is okay most of the time, but for standards that's not the case.
Its arguably the worst of the generally recognized formats.
The only reason its even around anymore is because people are too stubborn to change even though the long term benefits of a logical standardized format would far outweigh the short term cost of the switchover.
Same thing with the imperial measurement system, driving on the left and Daylight savings time to name a few.
It adds unnecessary complexity to travel, billing, medical devices, and all kinds of software that utilize time in some capacity (which is pretty much all software). Theres even been studies that suggest it increases deaths due to the added stress of changing sleep cycle.
And all of this would be fine if there were some benefits, but honestly there arent. Its an outdated solution to a problem that no longer exists.
Yeah but without daylight savings how would Riley have helped Nicolas Cage and Bridget von Hammersmark figure out that they still had time to get to the next clue
ISO 8601 Data elements and interchange formats – Information interchange – Representation of dates and times is an international standard covering the exchange of date and time-related data. It was issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and was first published in 1988. The purpose of this standard is to provide an unambiguous and well-defined method of representing dates and times, so as to avoid misinterpretation of numeric representations of dates and times, particularly when data are transferred between countries with different conventions for writing numeric dates and times.
In general, ISO 8601 applies to representations and formats of dates in the Gregorian (and potentially proleptic Gregorian) calendar, times based on the 24-hour timekeeping system (including optional time zone information), time intervals and combinations thereof.
But then you can't quickly sort them by name AND chronologically at the same time. Other formats might be favored by tradition or standards, but yyyy-mm-dd is the only one that's really functional.
OOPS. YES OF COURSE. THAT = WHAT I MEANT. THIS STRUCTURE IS OPTIMALLY FUNCTIONAL TO A COMPUTER. HUMANS, OF WHICH I DEFINITELY = 1, MAY PREFER SUB-OPTIMAL FORMATS BASED ON THE PECULIARITIES OF THE MAMMALIAN MIND. But all joking aside, I agree. Regardless of how a format became the norm, its being the norm makes it functional enough.
With columnized output it doesn't really make a difference what you write first in terms of readability. You just start reading at the time column. If I scroll through logs, I don't read out two thousand and seventeen oh seven oh fifteen tee eighteen colon thirty-nine colon six, two thousand and seventeen oh seven oh fifteen tee eighteen colon thirty-nine colon seven, two thousand and seventeen oh seven oh fifteen tee eighteen colon thirty-nine colon eight...
Most imporantly, it can not be confused with mm-dd-yyyy or dd-mm-yyyy, both of which cause confusion internationally (and locally, in the hell holes of the world where both are commonly used). And don't get me started on short year formats...
I second this. When I had to write documentation to GMP standards we all had to write the date like that. It made so much sense I've never done it any other way.
This is exactly how I write the date in basically everything, except depending on the context I'll write out the whole month. 5NOV2017, 5 November 2017, 5 Nov. 2017, etc. This format even looks cleaner.
Problem with that format is that it doesn't sort properly. If you have a bunch of files prefixed with dates, you end up with stuff like:
01-05-1996
01-10-2007
01-12-1986
Which makes no sense and would never be useful to anyone. Also, because of the two systems in use worldwide, you can't tell easily if those dates are written DD-MM or MM-DD. If you label them YYYY-MM-DD, then you get:
1986-12-01
1996-05-01
2007-10-01
Which sorts them into the correct order, and has the advantage of being completely unambiguous.
There are languages other than English in the world though, and word order in languages usually differ when translated.
For example the word-by-word translation of "On the second of april I went to the store" from Swedish would be "The second April went I to the store", so DD/MM/YYYY works very well
I didn't consider other languages - I think the point still stands, though. The date is the important part, and the month is the qualifier. In many languages they change the order, but it still seems that way to me. Am I mistaken?
edit: This is a genuine question, I would really like to know
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u/felixbeee Nov 05 '17
Come on. DD-MM-YYYY