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 SaturnImagine 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!
That would work better if Latin wasn’t there before English. Mars Victor!
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…
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.
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.
This is what I try to do in the few apps I’ve written that had to deal with dates and times
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)
ISO 8601 goes from 1582 (Julian calendar adoption) but can go even further with agreement about intention and goes down beyond the millisecond. Not sure why I want an integer from the year 2000 which only represents seconds.
Simplicity and precision.
Who said it was only measured as an integer? Seconds are a decimal value and many timekeeping applications require higher precision than to the millisecond. Referencing an epoch closer to our current time allows greater precision with a single double-precision floating point number.
Want to reference something before J2000? Use a negative number.
It’s independent of earth rotation, so no need to consider leap second updates either unless you are converting to UTC. It’s an absolute measure of time elapsed.
2013-02-27 is a weird way of writing 1361923200
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!
Where I live, “DD. MM. YYYY” is the standard but some old tombstones use
Do you know why one would ever do that? 20(02/05)25 feels like the “Don’t Dead Open Inside” of dates.
Which is exactly why they’re used on tombstones. See, the world makes sense after all!
That’s just a layout. Let’s not confuse presentation with content.
2013-02-27 = 1984
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…
I agree with the ISO approach, but unfortunately without mainstream adoption in a majority of countries it’s just another standard.
This is the way.
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.
I work at a global company an in my team there are people from 5 continents. we use 27-Feb-23. It’s the only way nobody gets confused and it’s only 1 char more. (Tbf nobody would be confused only my boss that is american lol)
Is that February 27th 2023 or February 23rd 2027?
guys its Dd Mmm Yy, like any sane non american person
Are you planning stuff 2 years ahead already?
I would still be confused by this…
Only if you’re american.
I am not. Swede.
You can even save a character by using NATO dates (leaving out the useless hyphens): 01DEC1953
thats not bad! I’ll introduce this option
As a Hungarian, I approve.
As an American, I can’t get people in my team to standardize their email signatures with correct spelling.
You know, I used to think ISO 8601 was just a boring technical standard for writing dates. But now I see it’s clearly the first step in a grand master plan! First, they make us write the year first, then the month, then the day-suddenly, our beloved 17.05.2025 turns into 2025-05-17. My birthday now looks like a WiFi password, and my calendar feels like a math equation.
But it doesn’t stop there. Today it’s the date format, tomorrow we’ll all be reading from right to left, and before you know it, our keyboards will be rearranged so QWERTY is replaced with mysterious squiggles and dots. Imagine the panic:
“First they came for our dates, then they came for our keyboards!”
At this rate, I’ll be drinking mint tea instead of coffee, my local kebab shop will start offering lutefisk shawarma, and Siri will only answer to “Inshallah.” The right-wing tabloids will have a field day:
“Western Civilization in Peril: Our Months and Days Held Hostage!”
But let’s be honest-if the worst thing that happens is we finally all agree on how to write today’s date, maybe world peace isn’t so far off. Until then, I’ll be over here, clutching my calendar and practicing my right-to-left reading skills… just in case.
(Don’t worry,this was just a joke! No offense intended-unless you’re a die-hard fan of confusing date formats, in which case, may the ISO be ever in your favor!)
Peace!
Make QWERTY into ABCDEF ;b
@[email protected] this might be applicable to the farside as well
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
I’m all for ISO format. I can’t imagine anyone having objections.
Posting in ISO format now, we’ll see if there’s any objections
Everyone should use date-time groups so we’re all on the same page down to the second.
DDHHMMSSZmmmYY
%Y%m%dT%H%M%SZ
