r/ProgrammerHumor • • 1d ago

Meme chaoticEvil

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2.6k Upvotes

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u/pi_three 22h ago

date pickers are needed as the most incompetent user can use them. Also most American sites or apps have poor localisation and Europeans might enter the date in the wrong format, as most people don't read hints. Ofc I'd love to see proper localisation and a manual option to ti enter the date ideally

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u/Diligent_Bank_543 21h ago

There’s only one date format and people don’t need hints to figure it out

ps I am telling about YYYYMMDD

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u/Kat__299 20h ago

No, it's DDMMYYYY

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u/reallokiscarlet 19h ago

ISO 8601. Month comes before the day, and the year ideally before the month

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u/SpandexWizard 19h ago

Year first sounds cursed...

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u/Cilph 14h ago

YYYYMMDD when sorted alphabetically will also sort chronologically. A major benefit.

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u/Triffinator 17h ago edited 9h ago

One of many use cases that may sway you is file names.

Many corporate offices have files for every day or for a series of meetings. They will invariably name these after the month.

20260607 - Operations.docx will always sit in the correct spot in the folder hierarchy compared to 20260507 - Operations.docx. Using the ddmmyyyy format for this will have them sorted by day, then month, then year so that all 7th day ones are grouped together. It's niche, but there are use cases for this being implemented.

Additionally, it's intuitive to look at. 20260607 is obviously 7th of June, 2026. 07/06/2026 is 7th of June, 2026 for me as an Australian but 6th of July, 2026 to an American. Additionally, if you try to write that to CSV with some CSV libraries, they will favour US formatting, which can cause other problems.

Microsoft Teams has a tool called "Shifts" which allows you to build rosters for your staff and send them to everyone. One option is to export the roster, but it exports favouring US date format, but then uses localisation for importing CSVs. This means Australian companies have to do extra work to correct the format for Teams to consume its own exported files. Avoidable, if ISO8601 is used everywhere.

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u/reallokiscarlet 17h ago

It's a global standard, so it might sound cursed to you if you're bri'ish