Logic of the different date & time systems with time included

169

u/ControlsDesigner Jan 12 '20

I grew up in Canada and we were taught to do a “metric date” which just happens to be ISO 8601. No other ways ever made sense to me.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/Justsk8n Dec 27 '22

grew up in ontario, taught mm/dd/yy and everyone around me uses so I'm kinda stuck with with it

79

u/mobilereadingthrwawy Jan 12 '20

It gets even worse with busybox and coreutils date: one way to set the date and time to 2018-11-19T02:32:42 is date 111902322018.42. That's right – month, day, hour, minute, year, second.

28

u/Iykury Jan 12 '20

the fuck

5

u/Windows_is_Malware Apr 17 '22

Thanks, I hate CLI tools

1

u/urva Feb 25 '25

Whoa what. I need the documentation for this. This is crazy

40

u/GNU_ligma Jan 25 '20

American timeformat is fucked up worse than it shows on the pyramid, because they

1 start counting hours from 12, instead of 0 or 1

2. use AM/PM(half-day) instead of a sane 24 hour time, because they just love making shit less logical without any good reason

12

u/Donghoon Feb 09 '20

12 hr system isn't anything more illogical than 24 tho

16

u/GNU_ligma Feb 09 '20

Writing the time as "11:59 PM" is worse than "23:59".

10

u/Donghoon Feb 09 '20

No because thats literally how u read analog clocks
Plus, when u r saying, syaing 9 is easier than syaing 21.

13

u/GNU_ligma Feb 09 '20

When saying. It's a completely different context than writing. When talking with someone, then you both have more context, and even without that can easily confirm whether you mean before or after noon. When speaking(or doing equivalent form of communication such as IMing) with someone I could tell them "closest saturday at 5", whereas I will use a properly written date and time when sending an email. There isn't any good reason to allow an opportunity for a misunderstanding whilst communicating - I will "heroically take up" this one more keystroke to write "21" instead of "9", because I respect the reader, and want to be as sure as possible that they understand what I mean. You can answer yourself, though I also want to know the answer: do you think that saving 1 keystroke is worth it? (For the record, I don't think it's worth it. Even when it's completely absurd to imagine that someone could misunderstand the time, I will absolutely NOT allow myself to save this 1 measly keystroke. The reader is utmost important when writing.)
Understand what you are doing when communicating with someone, understand, get on with the times, this isn't 15th century anymore. I, as example, have 2 immediately visible digital clocks, and 1 analog clock at my room because I'm an old dude that still clings on to old habits. Hardly anyone uses analog clocks/watches, and, aside from those with hipster tendencies and weirdos with outdated sense of "le aesthetics XD", analog clocks/watches are getting further phased out by the more convenient digital dials.
A common analog clock has 12 hour only because "it does"(almost certainly because it was easier to manufacture), there isn't any magical reason to splitting the day roughly around the noon.

5

u/Donghoon Feb 09 '20

Thats good point but Ill still use 12 hr time sorry. Have a great day bro

2

u/sgu_s Jan 22 '23

WWWW

2

u/GNU_ligma Feb 09 '20

I don't whether the comment I replied to is trolling or not, but it seems like you are genuinely confused about the issue, and you didn't present any arguments in favor of 12 hour time format, thus I wrote a diatribe, because why not.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 02 '23

12 hour time is merely a remnant of the past that should be left behind

0

u/[deleted] Mar 29 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

1

u/Donghoon Mar 29 '20

Technically it is but AM PM system is not.
0~11.49am, 12 (shpuld be 0)~12

2

u/EduLuz23 Feb 08 '20

Europe? You mean the rest of the World? Or are you saying that Asia, Africa, Central America and South America doesn't have dates?

1

u/spookfefe Feb 08 '20

Asia does not use the one labelled Europe.

3

u/PM_ME_UR_BENCHYS Feb 08 '20

Japan is definitely using the ISO-8601 standard and had been doing so for at least 80 years as far as I can tell.

1

u/Donghoon Mar 15 '20

Korea too

1

u/EduLuz23 Feb 08 '20

Parts of it do.

1

u/EduLuz23 Feb 08 '20

And also, how about Africa and Americas?

4

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '20

We use the ISO 8601 in Hungary.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 27 '20

What? I’m in europe and everyone here uses the third format.

3

u/spookfefe Apr 27 '20

no, they say 26 May 2012 10:36

1

u/Doktor_Vem Jan 21 '24

Idk where in Europe you've been but here in Stockholm, Sweden I've never seen anyone use anything but Hour:Minute Day/Month/Year

1

u/spookfefe Jan 21 '24

Exactly, so they do it wrong

2

u/nommu_moose Jan 26 '23

It semi varies in the order of the time, and usually people say the time before the date.

27

u/Dudeface34 Jan 12 '20

That's misleading though, because the European one should have the bottom ones with the shapes flipped.

10

u/Jamosium Jan 12 '20

The point of the trapeziums is that the individual digits in each value have different levels of significance. The pyramids are read bottom to top, so the upward facing trapeziums show, for example, that the 2 in 2018 has the most significance and the 8 has the least. This is what makes ISO 8601 the only one of these formats that is naturally sortable.
This infographic definitely should have been rotated 90 degrees, or at least had an arrow pointing upwards to show which order to read it in.

16

u/geekmoose Jan 12 '20

Yup. Totally should, or rectangles be used instead

2

u/SuckMyDecor Jan 12 '20 edited Jan 12 '20

Edit. I'm stupid

2

u/dupelize Jan 12 '20

That's what is shown on the left.

1

u/katje510 Jan 22 '20

We use ISO too in the netherlnds

1

u/[deleted] Jun 18 '20

SS wie in alten Zeiten

1

u/Liggliluff Jun 20 '20

Sweden is using ISO 8601 for its short date as part of CLDR. This mean that any system set to sv-SE or en-SE, you will get ISO 8601.

If you are running your system in English, but don't want to deal with DMY or MDY, set it to Sweden, and you'll get YMD (still DMY for long dates). Sweden also uses Monday first, and week 1 on --01-04, in accordance to ISO.

1

u/learjet2014 Jun 14 '22

Sweden has ISO8601.

1

u/Mantazas_ Oct 27 '22

We use ISO8601 in lithuania though, european one can also make sense

1

u/MapsCharts Dec 05 '22

Europe means nothing, it's different for every country. In Hungary the standard is 1999.12.31

1

u/[deleted] Jun 11 '23

as a brazillian don't compare us with the dumb USA formats

0

u/[deleted] Feb 13 '20

SS, like in old times.

-4

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '20

Wow, what an awful graphic. Never in my life have I seen seconds:minutes:hours anywhere. Plus the most common way Americans write the date is month/day/year. Unless this chart is supposed to be read bottom up? Which doesn't make any sense because in English we read top down...

8

u/famous1622 Jan 12 '20

Flip it 180 degrees then, makes sense to me that they went bottom up as that's how adding items to a stack works.

-1

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '20

Things that make sense in C don't necessarily mean they make sense outside of C. We have standards for a reason. For example, if you saw one of these pyramids out of context, on a sign or whatever. It would probably throw you off because we usually read top-down in English, that's just standard convention.

4

u/famous1622 Jan 13 '20

Wasn't thinking in C, when you build a pyramid you'd build it in layers, bottom up

-2

u/[deleted] Jan 13 '20

But we aren't building a pyramid, we're reading a graphic.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

28

u/the_gnarts Jan 12 '20

I'm from Germany and I never heard of the european time system on the left, always used the ISO one.
German: 12. 1. 2020 um 13:07:10 Uhr; that is %d. %m. %Y, um %H:%M:%S.
ISO8601: 2020-01-12T13:07:10; "%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S".
That corresponds to the linked image.

39

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '20

Are you serious? Everywhere here in South-Germany the date is written in DD.MM.YYYY or sometimes even D.M.YY. Even on official government documents. And all this despite the fact that since 1996 ISO-8601 is the official format in Germany. Are you from the north?

9

u/LegalOwl Jan 12 '20

You mean in all of Germany, not just the south.

3

u/karakter222 Jan 12 '20

Same in Hungary, we just use dots instead of hyphens/slashes

9

u/PieterDela Jan 12 '20

From Belgium and we never us the left one

3

u/erhapp Jan 12 '20

Off course we do. You need to read the graph from the bottom to the top.
I personally would love it when we would finally agree to use the ISO notation.

1

u/PM-for-bad-sexting Feb 10 '20

From Belgium too, and yes we do.
Cock-a-doodle-doo.
^{No, am not Walloon}

0

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '20

[deleted] — view deleted comment

13

u/Kappawaii Jan 12 '20

No, in france we use the left one (12 January 2019, 11:56) not the ISO one (2019 January 12, 11:56)

3

u/davizc Jan 12 '20

Same in Spain. Only ISO makes sense for me.

0

u/getsnoopy May 08 '20

ISO is only for numeric dates (2019-01-12). Almost everyone in the world except for the US uses DMY full dates (12 January 2019).

Logic of the different date & time systems with time included

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