Rich is right, since this is the date format that sorts correctly in filenames.
And it is easily extensible to YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss to include the time of day
Won’t be true after 9999-12-31, however.
Oh no! The Y10K bug!
Can’t wait for the Y40k bug, when Tyranids begin to infect our brains.
Bold of you to assume there isn’t already a genestealer cult on Terra. Washington specifically.
natural sort ftw
I’d be curious to see a sorting algorithm that doesn’t handle YYYYY-MM-DD with YYYY-MM-DD properly. If you drop the dashes you still get a proper numeric order. If you sort by component, you still get the proper order. Maybe a string sort wouldn’t? Off the top of my head the languages I’m thinking either put longer strings later, giving us the proper order, or could put 1YYYY- ahead of 1YYY-M so maybe string sorting is the only one that’s out.
Lexical sorting (string sorting/alphabetical order sorting) is what I believe they were referring to when talking about file names.
The fact that you don’t have to do any parsing of the string at all, just do a straight character-by-character alphabetical sort, and they will be sorted by date, is a great benifit of this date scheme. That means in situations where no special parsing is set up (eg, in a File Explorer windows showing a folders contents sorted alphabetically) or where your string isn’t strictly date only (eg, a file name format such as ‘2025-05-02 - Project 3.pdf’) you can still have everything sorted by date just by sorting alphabetically.
Its this benifit that is lost when rolling over to 5-digit years.
Can be solved with a small shellscript adding a leading zero to all filenames with the format.
Who’s Rich? Did you mean Randall?
…dammit, the only comics I read are XKCD and OOTS and I done fucked up.
Alt text:
ISO 8601 was published on 06/05/88 and most recently amended on 12/01/04.
But… that’s not the right way. Are you saying the ISO8601 violates ISO8601?
The joke is that they’ve not been given in ISO8601 format, and also that they’re both ambiguous. For the second one, we can’t even tell which of the ends is the year.
Honestly Randall absolutely would put the year in the middle just to fuck with us
Publication 1988-06-05, latest amendment 2004-12-01.
I almost expected the two dates to use different formats, but no, they’re just both “the American way”.
Well you can only cram in so many jokes at once. Would have been funny though
You found the joke
Is that the same guy who wrote Standards? tsk, tsk.
I regularly work with Americans, Canadians, and Europeans. So many times each group defaults to their own format and mistakes occur I gave up on all the formats listed by OP. If i have to write a date in correspondence its like: Feb 27th 2013. No ambiguity. No one has ever challenged me on it either. It is universally understood.
I prefer 27 Feb 2013, it’s how my work writes dates.
I prefer 27. Feb. 2013
I prefer 13 Feb 27
That’s not very onionized of you
You meant 27th Feb 2013, right? It is utterly moronic to have day in the middle irrespectively if you start with or finish on the year.
You meant 27th Feb 2013, right?
Does it matter anymore with this format? You figured out the exact day, month, and year irrespective of the order.
I was introduced to ISO 8601 in the US military. Yay standardization!
RFC-3336
I figured there were problems with existing calendars, so I created a new one to supersede all others. That reminds me, though: I need to declare the “official” format for the calendar, to avoid all this nonsense.
I see a window of opportunity, here. Normally, there’s no chance for any calendar revision to succeed in adoption; however, I think if I use the right words with the President, I could get it pushed into adoption by fiat. Y’all had best start learning my new calendar to get ahead of everyone else.
Note for the humorously disadvantaged: the Saturnalia Calendar is a mechanism through which I’m playing with a new (to me) programming language. I am under no disillusion that anyone else will see the obvious advantages and clear superiority of the Saturnalia Calendar, much less adopt it. And no comments from the peanut gallery about the name! What, did you expect me to actually spend time thinking of a catchy name when a perfectly good, mostly unused one already existed?
I’m partial to the IFC.
If it isn’t carved into a sheet of limestone using the Mayan character set, I don’t want to read about it.
I’m more into the FRC.
That’s where I started. I wanted a little project to try V on, and had come across the IFC, so I wrote a thing. While I was doing that, I got to thinking about the deficiencies and inherited complexities in IFC, and thought up Saturnalia.
If you pop up to my profile in Sourcehut, you’ll find a similar program - just a lot longer and more complex, for IFC.
I don’t know if they makes me a genius, but yes. Yes it does.
Why does nobody mention the Discordian calendar? 5 days per week, 73 days per month, 5 months to a year (Chaos, Discord, Confusion, Bureaucracy and the Aftermath). On leap years, it adds one additional day (St. Tib’s day) with a name but no numerical date.
I’m a pope, but then, we’re all popes.
My problem with Discordianism is that it’s all 5s, when 6 is clearly superior, and 12 trumps them all.
Hail Eris.
Amen. Shout it from the rooftops!
There are several people in the comments saying they have to use 27 Feb 2013 because they work with people all over the world. I’m really confused - what does that solve that 2013-02-13 does not? I know that not every language spells months the English way so “Dec” or “May” aren’t universal. Is there some country that regularly puts year day month that would break using ISO 8601 or RFC 3339?
27 Feb 2013 is unambiguous- regardless of where you’re from or how you write your dates, you can’t confuse 2013 for the month or day, you can’t confuse Feb for a day or week, and if you can’t figure 27 out, then we have bigger problems!
2013-02-27 is also unambiguous unless you’re aware of a country that uses year day month, is not?
2013-02-03 though. Someone would fuck it up
27 Feb is no more or less ambiguous than 02-27. The problems are when you choose a proper example, like 03/02
Which I was the justification used when my work decided to use 2025-May-01.
It’s close enough to the iso date that nobody will be confused but with that 1 extra layer of security blanket to separate months and days.
Of course, that does ruin sorting, so I think it was a bit silly, nobody has ever used yyyyddmm so it’s all a bit theoretical to me.
I think learning all abbreviations for different months in different languages is more complicated than just learning that the time is sorted from largest to smallest unit.
Until microsoft makes that the default down in the lower right corner, I don’t think we’ll make much headway. I’ve been trying to get my office to do their dated files in YYYYMMDDHHMM for years. I do mine that way but I can’t get anybody else to comply. This meme lists that as a discouraged format, I guess the dashes are ISO but I don’t care about the dashes. I would accept doing YYYY-MM-DD over MMDDYYYY any time though.
Upset we didn’t get a “Half a score, two years, two months, and four days ago…”
10:13 PM on February 27th, but how do you write the year?
10:13 would be 2213 ?
I’m a fool
So, assuming you got the time wrong and meant you could confuse year and time of day, ISO also puts time after date.
2025-05-01T18:18:03Z
Which makes sense. Higher unit to lower unit.
10:13pm or 8:13pm? I can see how this is confusing… perhaps another cartoon with more guidance might be needed.
Personally I like date time groups: 272013 Feb 2013
27.2.2013 is fine for handwriting on paper
For your example, maybe. If someone writes 8/3/2012, you don’t know which is month/day. And if they shorten it to 08/03/12 you literally can’t even conclusively determine the year, much less the month or day…
8/3/2012
You do. 8th of Feb in the entire civilised world and possibly 3rd of something in Trumpistan.
Which month is 27?
The one after the 26th.
That’s what we Europeans call a “petty answer to the disgrace that is Amarican military time” (not the be confused with regular Amarican time and dates, which don’t allow overflow, as far as I’m aware). The date described above is clearly “the second of March, 2015” or 2015-03-02.
I’m working in an international company with colleagues around the world. To avoid confusion, I switched to using this format:
27-FEB-2013
Nothing irritates me more than the “01-May-25”, “DD-Mon-YY” i.e. the way Oracle databases format dates by default.
Oh? It’s my favorite. Almost no ambiguity at all.
From my reading, it’s quite ambiguous. It could be 2025-05-01 or 2001-05-25.
DB2 has been using ISO dates by default for decades.
This format can fuck off. I prefer the unambiguous format 2FEB2013.
Checkmate, date snobs.
And yes, nations are free to use their appropriate abbreviations for the months.
Disregard ISO8601. Acquire RFC3339. You can leave off the T if you want to, or replace Z with
+00:00.
