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If that's the case when/why did the UK switch to day/month/year?
Did you ever see history portrayed as an old man with a wise brow and pulseless heart, weighing all things in the balance of reason?
Is not rather the genius of history like an eternal, imploring maiden, full of fire, with a burning heart and flaming soul, humanly warm and humanly beautiful?
--Zachris Topelius
Training a telescope on one’s own belly button will only reveal lint. You like that? You go right on staring at it. I prefer looking at galaxies.
-- Sarah Hoyt
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It's almost certainly a matter of month/day being most often used, year being added on optionally.
Consider the MM/DD portion of the date to be day-of-year. It's big-endian, which isn't bad in itself. Appending the year afterwards vs beforehand is normal in speech, but when you write it, it appears that you're now using little-endian: day-of-year/year. It's awkward, but not crazy.
If you think that crazy because mixing little-endian with big-endian is crazy, consider that DD/MM/YYYY is already mixing little- with big-, since the actual digits we write are big-endian.
(I prefer YYYY-MM-DD, myself, which is all big-endian and fully consistent, but the American way isn't illogical, per se.)
Jesse
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Since colonial times... Interesting. The Declaration of Independence is month day year, but I think Lincoln used day month year. But he also used four score and seven years ago, which is confusing to everyone today.
My theory has always been that it was the IRS in early 1900s using month day year that forced U.S. to "standardize" on the wacky date format.
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Yea, he even points out an instance where they use MM/DD/YYYY then DD/MM/YYYY in the same sentence. It seems as soon as people came over to the Americas, you see the MM/DD/YYYY format start being used along with DD/MM/YYYY, and then at some point people just decided to use MM/DD/YYYY exclusively. A historical mystery. Maybe it was just to spite the British?
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Chris Maunder wrote: whether we as developers have a responsibility to ensure that the information we present to the world is always presented unambiguously
Absolutely.
Chris Maunder wrote: Is this something you do?
Always.
Chris Maunder wrote: Is it something your lead actually stops you doing?
I am the lead. But if someone suggested that ambiguous display of dates was acceptable, I don't think they would last very long in our organization.
/ravi
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I manipulate and persist dates/times in an unambiguous fashion. I present them according to the user's preferences as indicated by the Windows locale or other mechanism.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Like a good developer should, thank you very much.
But in the current "developer" world (i.e. Silicon Valley style), minding that "not all of your millions of users are from the US" is a mind boggling concept. You think dates are bad? How about keyboard short-cuts that absolutely cannot work (looking at you Android Studio)? Everytime a see a "Ctr+/" or something like that, it's apparent that nobody tried the software with a non-US/UK keyboard. (hint, most naturalized keyboars use key combinations for (), [],\, etc.. So shortcuts that require those keys will not work.
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André Pereira wrote: How about keyboard short-cuts that absolutely cannot work
I have been through that scenario. I create user interfaces for our line of commercial ink-jet printing systems. Our UI is largely touch-screen driven. For one product line I implemented several locale-specific on-screen keyboard layouts for entry of file names and such. Most of them were fairly easy, except for the Japanese, Korean, and Simplified Chinese. For those I sent photos of the physical keyboard to colleagues in-country, and had them send me text files with the keytop characters encoded in UTF-16.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Quote: photos of the physical keyboard
Quote: had them send me text files with the keytop characters encoded in UTF-16
That's a very hands on solution I like it. It's something a script kiddie could do, instead of researching the whole thing. But no, they just look at their Mac and that's it.
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not forgetting degrees (temperature) and degrees angle. The latter is odd because almost all humans use the 0..360 whereas almost every math library uses radians - easy to visualise a 35 degree slope, but a .4 radians is how many? With pi an irrational number and computers not capable of doing infinite digits yet (not that long ago computers couldn't do over 6 dp very well) what a stupid choice that was.
Another that's slipping is currency: starting to see single decimals popping up: i.e. $5.5 ... sure cents (pennies if you must) are annoying, but it's just being lazy to skip that last digit.
(currently the temperature here is 298 degrees and my chair tilted at about .1 degrees, just the way this grumpy irrational old man likes it.)
Sin tack
the any key okay
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Actually I'm not sure why we don't stick to more fundamental units like that. 2π rad = a full circle - what could be easier? And frankly I'd be happy to switch to Kelvin if it meant never having to look at another negative temperature.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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I'd be happy just to never feel another negative temperature.
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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It seems we've come 2π rad.
/ravi
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 Now you're just being obtuse.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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That's acute one.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Maybe, but there are degrees of cute.
/ravi
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This is just going to go around in circles.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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I have a bone to pick with you - my radius.
/ravi
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 That's pretty humerus.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Are you trying to strong arm me?
/ravi
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I can't think of an on-topic comment that uses "uranus". 
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Shirley you mean 2π rads.
"the debugger doesn't tell me anything because this code compiles just fine" - random QA comment
"Facebook is where you tell lies to your friends. Twitter is where you tell the truth to strangers." - chriselst
"I don't drink any more... then again, I don't drink any less." - Mike Mullikins uncle
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Tau master race.
𝜏 = 1 full circle. F*** π!
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We use radians because the constants in (naively implemented) math libraries are inverses of integers.
As all serious math libraries use economised polynomials, this is less of a problem these days.
Note that IEEE 754-2008 recommends functions such as sinPi, defined as sin(pi*x). This could easily be modified to take angles in degrees, grads, mils, etc.
If you have an important point to make, don't try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time - a tremendous whack.
--Winston Churchill
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