What's the most petty/pointless/pedantic hill you're willing to die on?

NotNotMike@programming.dev to Ask Lemmy@lemmy.world – 456 points –

For me, it may be that the toilet paper roll needs to have the open end away from the wall. I don't want to reach under the roll to take a piece! That's ludicrous!

That or my recent addiction to correcting people when they use "less" when they should use "fewer"

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YYYY/MM/DD

For me it's YYYY-MM-DD https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html

Also, there is a special place for those people who keep making up new timestamps

Plus slashes are more likely to be blocked by arbitrary character set validation, and fail. Dashes more clearly distinguish the segments and are more compatible

Spacing of the letter and fewer clutter is also very good with dashes.

And don't work in filenames. But yes, files being in the same order when sorted lexicographic or chronologically makes me smile.

This is probably the best format and I would concede without question. Cheers!

I have (minor) beef with ISO 8601. It's very wishy washy about fractional seconds. It's like "eh, idc if you use a period or a comma to separate them"

I sign papers with customers from all over the world, and if I get to sign first and need to add a date, I invariably go for YYYY-MM-DD from ISO-8601. If they go first it's most often illegible to readers without any cultural context.

I agree. Plus, if you are naming files in your computer, using YYYY-MM-DD will keep them ordered chronologically by default.

I’ll be honest, while YMD is best, I’ll take anything that isn’t MDY.

MDY is just plain nuts, but has to be DMY for me, increasing length of time, left to right as that's the direction of reading (plus what I was taught!).

It's the only way that makes sense to parse. Imagine if literally anything else worked with the minor amounts first.

This thing costs 25 cents and 3,000 dollars

The time is currently 45:9.

This program is v11.7.9 and the next release is v0.8.9

I don't like "mixed number" format, like 1/4 and 648,3. I'd much rather say "five hundredths, two tenths, six ones, four tens, 8 hundreds and 3 thousand"

I guess a lot less recipes would get overseasoned though.

how would you shorten it? MM/DD feels wrong, and DD/MM makes no sense if you wanted it to be YYYY/MM/DD

What you're saying makes s lot of sense, but how do you speak dates?

When did you start working your current job? It was in 2022, Aprill 11th

What's your anniversary date? We were married on 2012, September the 9th.

People don't talk that way, which is how writing them down got to be the MMDDYYYY format in the first place. Technically, it was MMDDYY exclusively until mid 1999.

But why do people put the year last when speaking? It's no less arbitrary. We were just socialized to say it that way, so now it "sounds more natural," but it's not.

Also, speech doesn't dictate writing. Do British people say "11th April" out loud?

But everybody still writes addresses as person, street, place, country what is the reverse of the logical order with biggest geographical element first.

Address are written for humans.

For machines, the address line and postal code is the only important part, the rest is encoded in the postal code and can be left off.

While we're at it, make every name start with the surname. I understand why the majority of countries/languages start names with the forename, but finding people in a list of names is just so much easier when they are naturally called Swift Taylor and DeVito Danny.

Good for computers and spreadsheets, bad for people in mundane use.

Most of the time I know what year I'm dealing with so it goes in the back. Putting the day first doesn't help until I know what month we mean, so the month goes first.

Nightmare for file names and stuff though.

I see you woke up and chose violence. Dueling pistols at dawn it is then

For me, it's actually much better for file name sorting - and just about everything else. It numerically orders items in a logical manner allowing for batch processing of large sets of data using wildcards or regex, but I understand that it may not fit everyone's usecase...which is why, it seems everyday, there's someone introducing a new date format

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