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Comment by tjoff | Hacker News Reader

I'm so tired of having to do that game every time I see a date. It is not hard, but it is quite annoying. Especially since it isn't solvable in a lot of cases, so you try to reason your way to the most realistic interpretation.

It shouldn't be this hard.

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It’s not really that hard. Like the imperial system, Americans just memorize how it works as children and don’t think about it anymore.

Think about it like speaking a different language, except with numbers and not words.

The complaint isn't about the particular other order, but the fact that the order is ambiguous. In this case that doesn't matter, but often it does.

Americans memorize inches and yards, and often also memorize centimeters and meters, and working with either is fine, but we're not so often faced with numbers where it might be inches or centimeters and we have to figure out which (and when we are, it's sometimes a pain - certainly a bigger pain that working with known units).

Or, working with your language analogy, please go fetch me some "pasta" without knowing whether I'm speaking Italian or Polish.

Context matters in your pasta scenario.

Context also matters in the date parsing scenario. 11/12/22 could be several different dates depending on the context.

Yeah, and in this post, it's clear what it is.

It may not have happened to you yet, but someday you'll see a date somewhere other than this post.

This honestly has me laughing.

Since the text itself doesn't clarify, context is the only way of resolving any of the scenarios. In each case it's usually sufficient and often not all that hard. But it's always harder than if the system in use was made explicit, and I understand the complaint (even if my annoyance at the ambiguity is quite significantly below the level where I would have complained myself, particularly in this case).

I instinctively felt that the ambiguity ought to not truly exist, but I wanted to find some backing. According to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

… all the major predominantly English speaking counties will use mostly hyphens in the dd-mm-yyyy format. So although there is ambiguity, it’s easily resolved by picking that as the default mentally and only back tracking on failure.

Now in the more general case, this whole thing feels like a lieutenant/leftenant situation. We are annoyed simply because it’s not they way that we do things in a peculiar case, when otherwise the language is fully intelligible.

Even people in non-English-speaking countries write in English all the time, especially on the Internet.

Picking one default and back-tracking on failure really isn't that comforting nor the constant reminder that the date you thought it was might be something else.

> … all the major predominantly English speaking counties will use mostly hyphens in the dd-mm-yyyy format.

Yes, which makes reasonable the complaint about mm-dd-yyy.

> So although there is ambiguity, it’s easily resolved by picking that as the default mentally and only back tracking on failure.

This is both more work and also error prone in the general case (although it works out fine in this case).

> Now in the more general case, this whole thing feels like a lieutenant/leftenant situation.

Not at all. Whether I read "lieutenant" or "leftenant", I know what you're talking about. If I read 2-10-23, I might miss your birthday party.

> Think about it like speaking a different language

The correct analogy is I don't know which language is spoken and the same words get used in multiple languages with different meaning. Now I can apply heuristics to figure it out or in some cases I can only guess.

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