Has anyone ever heard a good reason for using the mm/dd/yyyy date format? Just curious
Celebrating pi day don’t make much sense when your date format is dd/mm.
Go 3/14! ;-))
Happy pi day!
Convention is the reason, I’m not sure it is a good reason, but it does tend to dominate so many silly “unconventional” aspects of US standards. (I’m a US citizen if that matters.)
The best I’ve heard is because it’s the way you say it (look at the dates on these replies). Although that’s erroneous since I hear just as many people say “the 5th of March” instead of “March [the] 5th.”
The US way is kind of nonsensical. The only two ways that make any sense are dd/mm/yyyy and yyyy/mm/dd. The latter is preferable for searches (as already mentioned)
I learned quite a bit from folks who left comments on my “Turkey Test” post. One of most interesting was that in Germany, Excel CSV files use semicolons. That is, you can’t look for “,” but rather CultureInfo.TextInfo.ListSeparator.
Cagri, no need to be defensive, your point is what Jeff is also trying to explain here.
One of most interesting was that in Germany, Excel CSV files use semicolons.
because the decimal separator is the comma. i.e. 1.25 - 1,25.
If you run your .NET projects through FxCop with the standard rules turned on, it will alert you to every string parsing or writing routine where you haven’t considered the locale. Easy way to help being “Turkey compliant”…
Turkish “i” character is a common problem It does not even support CCS capitalize command too.
And there are many softwares which stuck in Turkish locale which is mostly about lazy-coding.
About the Midnight Express, I live in USA, have gone to Turkey few times (by the way they are great people in general) and the movie is a bullshit similar to USA bringing democracy to Iraq.
And to remind, USA still tortures people officially from Iraq war in Guatemala.
There are a whole host of BUSINESS ISSUES that aren’t readily apparent when it comes to internationalization. For example, postal codes in the UK can contain alpha characters as well as digits. Many people have more than three names so the typical American first, middle, last doesn’t cover all of the possibilities. And I could go on and on.
It takes a lot more than choosing invariant cultures, formatting dates, and formatting decimals correctly for a program to be truly “internationalized”. You also have to make sure that the business rules are adjusted as well.
Good Lord, can’t we move past the referece to Midnight Express and just discuss the i18n problem. That reference was one small piece of an important topic, but instead of reading comments on how other people handle it, I am reading numerous posts about the US still torturing people, ABU Ghraib, and basically how Americans are lazy coders with no regard for other cultures…
If I wanted to read those types of comments, I’d go to CNN or MSNBC and read their blogs…
Let’s stay focused and on topic.
Convention… to keep Americans happy… Pi day…
Thanks for all your answers, but I’m still looking for a good reason…
It used to be the “convention” to send children to work down mines, or to make women stay at home raising a family. To me, tradition and convention don’t seem like good reasons to keep doing something utterly ridiculous - just reasons that don’t require further thought. Oh well… perhaps I’m in the minority on this one…
As for Pi day - the only people who care about that are mathematicians and geeks. I would imagine that most mathematicians and geeks are familiar with modulo arithmetic, so why not celebrate it on the 3rd of January?
(For what it’s worth, I’m a UK citizen who uses dd/mm/yyyy to comply with the rest of the country, but would rather the world standardised itself and started using yyyy/mm/dd. I also believe that we don’t need any numerical seperator besides the decimal point - what is so confusing about 2000000 compared to 2,000,000 anyway?)
“In the United States, we use commas to group digits, like so: 32,768. In Turkey, they group digits using a period, so the same number would be entered as 32.768.”
Uh, wtf? In Spanish-speaking countries (surely more users than Turkey alone!), we also have comma and period swapped compared to English. Comma for decimals, period for thousands grouping.
As echoed by millions here, dd.mm.yy is followed a lot in other countries. When it comes to grouping digits, remember that comma(,) is used as decimal in some european countries. There are some stuff only US follow but not many acknowledge there are others who don’t follow those standards…
Besides; most of us play cricket not baseball 
The difference in 2000000 and 2,000,000 is readability. Is the first two million, two hundred thousand, or twenty million? Hard to tell at a quick glance, but the logical grouping into common units (tens, hundreds, thousands, etc…) makes it easier to read.
As for the mm/dd/yyyy date format, convention and common use is what brings that in. As an American, I have been taught since pre-school to write dates as March 13, 2008 on everything. So that carries over into work life and programming. Old habits are hard to break. The metric system is how old, yet we still use what we call the Standard system.
It’s hard to justify to the entire country that a few programmers think date format should be changed to make it easier to write code.
It all boils down to the Secret society of Stonecutters. “Who keeps the metric system down? We Do!”
Relax everyone! When the NWO takes over there will be only one language, you will have a unique number (so don’t worry about how many middle names you have), and “Globalization” will have removed the need for any of this.
This brief period in time, made possible in part by the US Constitution, where freedom to do and innovate ran rampant, will finally become under control of the world leaders, and will be found in Wikipedia as an interesting footnote in history. No doubt Googled on by your grandkids with great curiosity in their State-run cooperatives.
THX-1138.
And to remind, USA still tortures people officially from Iraq war in Guatemala.
Brian Kelian on March 14, 2008 06:21 AM
I think you meant Guantanamo (a.k.a. gitmo) unless im mistaken.
This sounds arrogant, but I am not meaning for it to sound that way…
One last thing… For the past 40-50 years, where was the global epicenter of business? The United States. Where were many of the companies founded that create the computers and operating systems we still use? The United States. Apple, HP, IBM, Microsoft, SUN… these companies originated in the US, so naturally they will adopt the US standards. It’s only been in the last 20 years that globalization has been a big buzz word. Many of these things originated in a closed system.
Hey funny you should mention date issues, just going through a problem with SQL and date/time.
Come to mention it what time zone am I posting in (see bottom of post)shouldn’t it be GMT.
Coding horror fan!
In OS X you could use CFStringCompareWithOptionsAndLocale, which can ignore character differences such as the Turkish I.
In Britain the ‘standard’ system is known as imperial.
Yet it is not standard and the rest of the world thinks of america as imperialistic. How ironic