Hacker News Reader

Comment by looki | Hacker News Reader

The output is the same as just "cal" for me, so I had to see what it's about: It puts Monday as the first day of the week. I guess that is because I use the German date locale. Seems that the US uses Sunday as the first day of the week in calendars and such, but does it make any difference beyond those? Don't people "feel" that Monday is the first day of the week because the weekend is over and they have to get back to work?

View on HN

Prior HN discussion about the reason for the first day of the week:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11360648

Interesting, thanks.

On OS X:

  cal: option requires an argument -- m
  usage: cal [-jy] [[month] year]
         cal [-j] [-m month] [year]
         ncal [-Jjpwy] [-s country_code] [[month] year]
         ncal [-Jeo] [year]

I feel Sunday is the start of the week because that's what I've been seeing on calendars my whole life. I do bundle Mon-Fri and Sat-Sun into "weekdays" and "weekend" in my head, but when I visualize a week in my head, it always starts on Sunday.

> Don't people "feel" that Monday is the first day of the week because the weekend is over and they have to get back to work?

No, I feel that Sunday is the day of rest I start my week with, then I do some work, and finally I rest again: in that way my day is a microcosm of my week (and one might think that in a more primitive society my year would be a macrocosm, as I did more work spring-summer than during the winter).

I personally detest calendars which display Monday as the first day of the week, and am genuinely curious why ISO chose that.

> I personally detest calendars which display Monday as the first day of the week, and am genuinely curious why ISO chose that.

I think ISO chose it because there was considerable difference between countries as to what the first day of the week in usual calendar presentation was when ISO 8601 was being considered, they needed something consistent, and it just happened to shake out to Monday.

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_days_of_the_week#..., it appears that almost every language which numbers the days of the week starts on Sunday, with the exception of some Slavic languages (which use Monday) and Swahili (which uses Saturday).

The Chinese language family is a pretty big one, at least in terms of population. They all start numbering with Day One as Monday.

>and am genuinely curious why ISO chose that.

Because ISO is all about business, and Monday is the start of the business/banking etc week.

I personally detest calendars which display Sunday as the first day of the week, since it's incorrect according to one of the earliest memories I have -- my mum teaching my this rhyme:

  Solomon Grundy,
  Born on a Monday,
  Christened on Tuesday,
  Married on Wednesday,
  Took ill on Thursday,
  Grew worse on Friday,
  Died on Saturday,
  Buried on Sunday,
  That was the end,
  Of Solomon Grundy.

Also, Saturday and Sunday are the weekend, not the week-edges.

There's a bug in cal -- the man page says "-M" makes the week start on Monday, but my version doesn't accepthe argument.

I find it quite confusing when calendars mess this up. I once booked a flight on the wrong day, because I somehow switched to the American localization of the airline's website part-way through the booking process.

> Also, Saturday and Sunday are the weekend, not the week-edges.

You might be interested to know that in Israel the work week starts on Sunday, not Monday. Friday and Saturday are the weekend.

That might just be a factoid, except that the Jewish Sabbath was the origin of the weekend concept. It changed in countries with a strong Christian influence so that Monday because the first day.

It never changed in the US because the Jewish workweek had a stronger influence there than the Christian one.

> I personally detest calendars which display Sunday as the first day of the week

And I personally find calendars that start on Monday quite bizarre since it's obviously incorrect historically.

Why ISO 8601 has Monday as day #1 and Sunday as day #7 is explained in the standard itself, in Annex A (on page 25 in ISO 8601:2004).

Tried setting it to Swedish locale but either I did it wrong or it didn't do anything :)

Just updated the post and added a section on how to set Monday as the first day of the week.

try it with 'ncal' and a capital 'M'

     ncal -M [year]

FreeBSD (17 ~): ncal -M 2016 ncal: illegal option -- M Usage: cal [general options] [-hjy] [[month] year] cal [general options] [-hj] [-m month] [year] ncal [general options] [-hJjpwy] [-s country_code] [[month] year] ncal [general options] [-hJeo] [year] General options: [-NC3] [-A months] [-B months] For debug the highlighting: [-H yyyy-mm-dd] [-d yyyy-mm]

The -M and -S options are extensions that are patched into the Debian ports of the FreeBSD ncal command. They have not been contributed back to the original, and some of the weekday calculations (that involve querying what the current locale's idea of the first day of the week is using the SUS2 nl_langinfo() library function) are tied to GNU libc.

* http://anonscm.debian.org/cgit/bsdmainutils/bsdmainutils.git...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com