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Quote: Don't forget the bad coffee.
Actually, I like the coffee.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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Forogar wrote: Actually, I like the coffee.
You're right, the coffee's good. It's a good cup of tea that is impossible to find anywhere. Serves them right for ditching in Boston harbour.
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Quote: a good cup of tea that is impossible to find
Too true! Until I moved to the US I mostly drank tea, now I mostly drink coffee, not because I like coffee better but because good tea is only available when I make it myself from re-imported tea from the UK!
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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We have decent coffee now. Those Central/South American puppet dictatorships needed to be put to useful work (for us), and cocaine and bananas weren't keeping them busy enough.
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cheers
Chris Maunder
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I think, "mm/dd/yyyy" format is being used where end users forget to change the Locale settings and/or doesn't care about changing it. I am one of them and that is why, I am using "mm/dd/yyyy" format.
The sh*t I complain about
It's like there ain't a cloud in the sky and it's raining out - Eminem
~! Firewall !~
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I use it because that's how it would usually be spoken. (Usually) One would say June 10th 2016, not 10 June 2016. Oh... And I'm also American. 
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Quote: One would say June 10th 2016, not 10 June 2016
You might say it in this weird, backwards way because that is the the way you were brought up under the faulty US education system. To you it seems natural just as, to the rest of the world saying, "Tenth of June" is more natural.
- I would love to change the world, but they won’t give me the source code.
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So 'Twelfth of Never' wasn't written by an American?
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
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I'm more likely to say 10th of June than June 10th. June 10th just feels clumsier; less civilised. Oh wait, I get it now. 
This space for rent
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So what's this "fourth of July" thing I keep hearing about?
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Chris- That's easy, the "Fourth of July" (or Independence Day) is celebrated on July fourth! Also, good tea is widely available here. Typically I choose Twinings.
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My vote is on the ISO standard.
The funny thing with the 'muricans is that they aren't even consistent[^].
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Not to mention time zones, winter and summer time, formatting, parsing, the time part of dates, leap years, different ranges in different types/systems, timespans vs. datetimes...
Yeah, it's about time someone lost his mind 
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+1 to time! Why the hell we should deal with these idiotic am/pm/fm/zm?? Just to say 23:17 and viola - everybody knows when it is!
Same with "timezones" - another world-wide stupidity! One time can fit all. Who care I wake up at 8:00 or 23:00?? If daylight in my country will be from 23:00...15:00, it won't affect my life even on a cent. So when it's 17:23 in England, let it be everywhere! In any case before calling my friend in Japan I confirm they have daytime. This unification immediately simplifies a lot of schedules and calculations (hi, DBMS!). When you depart from Australia at 3:00, you arrive _at_calculable_time_ in US and you don't have to think how much hours is difference between timezones.
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The applications I write store a date as a time stamp and display it in the way the computer's culture specifies (the user can generally override that, though).
I honestly hate it when a company doesn't localize things like dates, which is why I do so.
What do you get when you cross a joke with a rhetorical question?
The metaphorical solid rear-end expulsions have impacted the metaphorical motorized bladed rotating air movement mechanism.
Do questions with multiple question marks annoy you???
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I have no idea why. We nearly changed to Celsius from Fahrenheit about 35 years ago, but to no avail.
I will admit, recently traveling abroad, I nearly entered my DOB as mm/dd/yyyy instead of dd/mm/yyyy for the custom's arrival and departure cards. Luckily my programming instincts kicked in and I made it through without incident.
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Come on Chris, everyone in the world knows that Americans don't care what other countries have to endure, as long as we make money pushing out crap to ya'll.
Runs for cover...
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Well, how come you don't ship outside the States then? He did ask! It does seem to be a wasted opportunity to grab bundles of cash from us! Oh, the t-shirts I'd buy! 
I am not a number. I am a ... no, wait!
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Totally agree. It can be argued that dd/mm/yyyy is also ambiguous, but at least the parts of the date are sorted in a meaningful way. Expressing a date in the format mm/dd/yy is like a car salesman telling you that this SUV you're looking at will cost 999 $, 99 cents, and 24 thousand $. 
The problem I see with any of the aother alternate formats is that either the position of days and months is still ambiguous, or the month is expressed as a name or shortcut thereof, which adds a language-dependend component. Neither is great for international use so I prefer yyyy-mm-dd. At least that one can be sorted. And it works for car salesmen too 
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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I'd like to response with another question. Imagine that you have international project with 20 countries involved, but 90% of your income is generated by USA customers. Which format you will choose? USA or Canadian?
Another use case, imagine, that initially all your customers where from USA and only in two years after launching your product, you got those customers in other countries. What as usually customers ask: change format of dates or some other feature. From my experience issue with dates formatting was in backlog, but as usually it is not in high priority.
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witnes wrote: Which format you will choose? USA or Canadian?
Neither. That's what Locale is for. If only 10% of your revenue comes from people outside the US it's time you spend more effort making foreign customers comfortable.
That said, I'm not american - leave it in US format for all I care
GOTOs are a bit like wire coat hangers: they tend to breed in the darkness, such that where there once were few, eventually there are many, and the program's architecture collapses beneath them. (Fran Poretto)
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witnes wrote: Imagine that you have international project with 20 countries involved
Although it was only a couple of countries, my mind turns towards the Hubble telescope. Oops!
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Some years ago one of the departments in our US based company created a new international telephone directory. This contained all the phone numbers of our offices, and agents, worldwide. So it needed to prefix the numbers with the country code. But just to be helpful they included the IDD prefix also, so every number listed had the US IDD prefix 011-xx-xxx-xxxxxx. And whenever one tried to explain that certain Americanisms did not work or make sense in other countries, the response was always, "Thank you for your concern, we will take it under advisement".
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Having worked in the US, Canada and Europe I have similar experiences with the date format used by Americans and Canadians (sometimes, when it suits) I ended up adopting my own format which is unambiguous, easy, needs no spaces or punctuation, easily parsed and, to me at least, makes sense - ddmmmyy where mmm is the first three letters of the month 11Nov16, 09Sep14 etc and without explanation or reference it should be immediately understood by everyone (except maybe them Canadian Frenchies who would pretend not to understand it as a matter of principle)
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