this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2025
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[–] shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lol 29 points 20 hours ago (30 children)

Anyone who uses YYMMDD instead of ISO 8601 needs to be fed feet first into a wood chipper.

[–] absentbird@lemmy.world 22 points 20 hours ago (24 children)

ISO 8601 is YYYYMMDD (or YYYY-MM-DD in extended format)

Are you really going to wood chipper someone for leaving off the leading 20? I think we can safely infer the century and millennium with a high confidence, why not trade them for two extra name characters?

[–] shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lol 20 points 20 hours ago (17 children)

As an old person who has archives dating back to the 90s, yes.

[–] absentbird@lemmy.world 4 points 16 hours ago (2 children)

Here you go gramps:

(shortD) => {
    return parseInt(shortD.slice(0, 2), 10) > 50 ? "19" + shortD : "20"+shortD;
}
[–] 5C5C5C@programming.dev 10 points 15 hours ago* (last edited 15 hours ago) (2 children)

Did the software industry learn nothing from Y2K? Was it too long ago already for people to remember the mess we made for ourselves?

Saving two characters in a file name is not worth the hell you are leaving in your trail by shoving this nonsense in an obscure corner of production code that people are going to forget about until it's too late.

[–] Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 13 hours ago

Their grandchildren will be pissing on their graves over it.

I often wonder what files may outlive me.

People have kept old physical remnants. There are obviously famous examples but there are far more mediocre examples.

All the unique content I've created fits on a modestly sized hard drive so keeping it around would be trivial compared to maintaining all those physical remnants.

[–] absentbird@lemmy.world 2 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

It's just a filename, calm down. The created by date is tracked by the file system and the repo.

[–] seralth@lemmy.world 3 points 14 hours ago (2 children)

And you assume that changes to filesystems, new filesystems being created or other such things won't at some point create a edge case that creates a problem?

When you could just be safe? Sounds stupid as fuck to me to blindly trust nothing will happen to create problems.

[–] shnizmuffin@lemmy.inbutts.lol 1 points 5 hours ago

They've never had to recover a hard drive. It's okay, they'll learn the hard way.

[–] absentbird@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago

I understand you feel very strongly about four digit years, but I really don't see any situation that I couldn't sort out with a simple script.

Usually I don't put dates in file names in the first place, but when I do I use the UTC timestamp; a date without a timezone is inherently fuzzy, and it's easier to compare and differentiate numerical times.

If someone used two digit years in their naming convention I wouldn't even blink, let alone get the woodchipper, life is too short to get angry over stuff like that.

[–] 5C5C5C@programming.dev 1 points 14 hours ago

Until people start applying the same logic everywhere for consistency, not just in file names.

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