• (cs)

    NOW the real WTF is VBA.

  • Dazed (unregistered) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    Actually it would be pretty obvious to Americans too. Especially developers/programmers, since we are used to internationalization and various different date formats (even more than mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy).
    Maybe obvious to some Americans. I have actually witnessed a related situation where a European customer had bought a customised product from an American supplier. In the contract it clearly stated that all dates had to be handled in European format, so when they weren't it was reported as a bug. The response from the supplier was that unfortunately it was impossible for them to do this. Yes - "impossible". The response from the client was to summarily terminate the contract.
  • Robb (unregistered)

    Modifying the Date variable isn't THAT strange. It seems akin to changing an environment variable in your code and wondering why something isn't working right.

    This burned us not to long ago, we had some code using putenv that was modifying an environment variable and not taking into account who else might need it. But the code never made it past unit testing.

  • Geoff (unregistered) in reply to Mike

    Like many people on this board I correctly guess it was a format issue. As a developer I, like probably Moe, was rather mystified as to why a report which should only read the date could change it.

    1. The TRWFT here is letting users run as Administrator, had it not been for that the problem would have been apparent right off, well unless it was all wraped in On Error Resume Next anyway.

    2. The next issue being that ' format the date Date = month & "/" & day & "/" & year

    really is setting the date, which is interesting because month,day,and year must be getting pulled from some source that matches the system. It can't be necessary. What the developer should have in that page header macro was probably just, Today() or now().

  • Andy (unregistered) in reply to Bort
    Bort:
    It's because when you say the date out loud, you don't say "5th July." You say "July 5th."
    Well, like The Mole said, no we don't, not in the UK, and certainly not in France.
  • Jens (unregistered) in reply to Zebedee

    Except for Americans.

    ISO formats anyone? SI units? Or better lose Mars probes.

  • Jens (unregistered) in reply to Meep

    ISO 8601. Not Brüssel. None of the formats you mentioned.

  • BertBert (unregistered) in reply to TheCPUWizard
    TheCPUWizard:
    Bort:
    It's because when you say the date out loud, you don't say "5th July." You say "July 5th."

    No, I say the "5th of July".

    Surprised that no Dutch person responded yet. In the Netherlands we don't use ordinal numbers for dates, so it is just 'vijf juli' (five July). I think in French it is the same.

    (Preferring yyyymmdd though.)

  • (cs)

    Yeah. That really was pretty obvious from the moment it said "month and day swapped sometimes", that it was a localization issue. And I'm also an American, lived here all my life. I haven't even done that much work on localization, but you pick stuff up just working as a programmer around anyone who's ever done any localization or localization testing. Which, clearly, nobody there ever had.

    That said, I do believe this would also be one of the rare times when "trwtf is VB" is actually entirely applicable. Or, VBA, anyway.

    EDIT: Also, while I might not say "5th July", as that would imply that it's the 5th July in a sequence of Julys, I would say "the 5th of July". You know, like the name of the holiday we just got off, "the 4th of July"?

  • (cs) in reply to PurpleDog
    PurpleDog:
    Americans aside, did anyone not instantly realise what the problem was? Three years? Get a non-US developer on the job and you'd have the fix within a day.

    As a US developer (admittedly, one who has been overseas) I spotted it immediately. Finding it could still be hard, though.

  • techpaul (unregistered) in reply to Migala
    Migala:
    Meep:
    It just breaks my heart that I'm not a European and don't have a bunch of obsessive compulsive Belgian bureaucrats to regulate every fucking aspect of my life.

    But, but... then how do you deal with inconsistent banana curvatures??

    Easily as it made no difference as in a lot of standards especially ISO are adoptions of other standards. In this case it was the adoption of the standard as created by the banana wholesalers and the buying specs for supermarkets and other food distribution.

    So that standard codified what was in existence for about 20 years before that.

  • M (unregistered)

    Well, vive la difference! It'd be boring if there were no quibbles and eccentricities that seperated us, if everyone used one system for measuring units, represented the date the same way, and insisted on using the exact same definition of a lb or a pint.
    There'd be no differences to celebrate, no issue of localisation for developers, and no excuses for why multi-billion dollar spacecraft crash.

  • (cs)

    The bug they described-their computer's internal date was randomly changing-reeked of user error...

    And on that day, Alex learned the difference between hyphens and em dashes.

  • Brad (unregistered)

    In summary:

    • US date system is kinda bullshit
    • Common Date Format (dd/mm/yyyy) is much more logical, but sucks for computing
    • ISO standard (yyyy-mm-dd) is the best for internationalisation and computing, but noone likes the look of it
    • That developer wasn't very good
  • SeySayux (unregistered) in reply to Someone who can't be bothered to login from work
    Someone who can't be bothered to login from work:
    Meep:
    Zebedee:
    It was fairly obvious from the first sentence that this was going to have something to do with the unusual way Americans represent dates.

    Ah, as opposed to the international standard of yymmdd, or, wait, is it ddmmyy?

    It just breaks my heart that I'm not a European and don't have a bunch of obsessive compulsive Belgian bureaucrats to regulate every fucking aspect of my life.

    Belgium can't regulate anything, they can't even elect a government right now. Seriously, they went for nearly eight months without one. They might still be without one for all I know.

    I'm sure the US and everywhere else in the world has its own fair share of stupid bureaucratic laws anyway.

    1. Actually, the elections are over, it's the government formation that's taking a long time. But I guess that's a tad difficult to understand for an American that's used to a two-party winner-takes-all system.
    2. The government formations are taking almost 13 months now and still counting. Wikipedia has a nice article about it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010%E2%80%932011_Belgian_government_formation

    Next time you bash Belgium, please study it first. Thanks.

    PS. This does not make me a "Belgium fanboy". It does make me a Belgian, though.

  • (cs)
    After another hour of digging through sub-routine after sub-routine and script after script, he finally found the offending code buried in the page header macro...

    Zoom, and enhance, and zoom, and enhance. What did you expect, Horatio Caine to put his sunglasses on and give a witty one-liner?

  • Elezar (unregistered) in reply to blarg

    I'm sure some do, but in the US it's really rare. In fact, I hear it said that way so rarely, that saying it that way sounds really weird.

    That said, the fact that we refer to Independence Day as the fourth of July indicates that it used to be the norm to say the day first. Which makes sense, since at the time that the fourth of July became a meaningful date, most people would have still been used to doing things the British way. So, just saying that it's because of how we say the dates, isn't really an answer. Why do we say the dates that way?

    My best guess is that during the Revolutionary War, people were trying to be "less British" in as many ways as possible, so changed even little things like the way they write/say dates.

  • dkallen (unregistered) in reply to Severity One
    Severity One:
    Well, the typical American unawareness of people in other countries doing things differently (actually, the entire world doing things differently) is an issue, of course.

    It's a burden, being the only ones doing things correctly. But we manage to bear it...

  • Anon (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that the French employees were running windows in administrator mode, right?

    I mean, you can't even open the clock on a properly locked down system!

  • (cs) in reply to Tom
    Tom:
    make dates YYYYMMDD

    +1 This (I do it all the time)

  • (cs) in reply to luptatum
    luptatum:
    Anyone speaking ISO (yyyy-mm-dd) btw.?
    One of the first things I do to any new gizmo I get that can report date and time is change it to use yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm.
  • Bob (unregistered)

    I'd guessed the punchline by the fourth sentence.

    TRWTF is that date function...

  • Polar Bear (unregistered)

    Julian date formats are the way to go...no need in confusing things with a month at all...simply a year and a day: yyyyjjj

  • Bort (unregistered) in reply to Bort
    Bort:
    It's because when you say the date out loud, you don't say "5th July." You say "July 5th."

    Holy shit. Another guy named Bort who was thinking exactly what I was thinking.

  • F (unregistered) in reply to Cujo DeSockpuppet
    Cujo DeSockpuppet:
    Come on, we all know the only real date format worth using is YYDDD. It saves a lot of space on my punch cards.

    And just what is wrong with paper tape?

  • Someone who can't be bothered to login from work (unregistered) in reply to The Mole
    The Mole:
    Bort:
    It's because when you say the date out loud, you don't say "5th July." You say "July 5th."

    Try coming to a UK and you'll notice that dates are written "5th July 2011" and pronounced "The fifth of July two thousand and 11".

    There is nothing more irritating and insulting* than seeing tv adverts for which they haven't taken the effort to localize and instead say "July fifth"!

    *other than all the other things that are naturally

    Well, I'd say twenty-eleven, but other than that, yes :)

    (Try saying 1984 out that loud your way round, it sounds utterly silly and wrong.)

  • Hortical (unregistered) in reply to SeySayux
    SeySayux:
    Next time you bash Belgium, please study it first. Thanks.

    PS. This does not make me a "Belgium fanboy". It does make me a Belgian, though.

    I'm so sorry I'm not familiar with the intricacies of YOUR system and how it's different from the 20 other similar systems that neighbor you.

  • Bombomil (guest) (unregistered) in reply to Bort

    Here in The Netherlands we swap, when speaking, some of the digits in the value. Like 21 becomes een-en-twintig (one-and-twenty). If the value has 4 digits we often pronounce it as a number of hundreds. This means that something like 2345 becomes drie-en-twintig honderd, vijf-en-veertig (three-and-twenty hundreds, five-and-fourty).

    I would just love to see that expressed in computer-programming (most, but not all pairs of digits swapped). It would make a language as white-space an easy one to decipher. :-)

    Oh, by the way: wasn't yesterday "the fourth of july" for you guys ? :-p

  • MeRp (unregistered) in reply to kikito
    kikito:
    That mm/dd/yyyy and dd/mm/yyyy business is just a blasphemous invention from devil itself.

    There is only One True Date Format and that is yyyy-mm-dd.

    Meditate, and you will be enlightened.

    There is only One True Date Format and that is x, where x is the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970.

    epoch FTW.

  • Zebedee (unregistered) in reply to Someone who can't be bothered to login from work

    That's interesting, most people in the UK would say two thousand and eleven. How would you say the year 2000, twenty-hundred?

  • (cs) in reply to Anon
    Anon:
    Why is a report changing the system clock in the first place?
    An accurate description of TRWTF? Really?! You must be new here.
  • Anonymous non Coward (unregistered) in reply to Mike
    Mike:
    Even this american non-developer figured out in the first few lines that the problem lie in the backwards dates in the EU. Something was setting system time using the american standard on a french system - tracking it down would be the hard part.

    And certainly should never have taken that long.

    "Most common usage See also: Category:Date and time representation by country [edit] Date See also: Date format by country

    In terms of dates, most countries use the "day month year" format. In terms of people the big-endian form is also very common, since that is used in East Asia, Iran and partially in India."

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

    Medium Indian is roughly use , in ... The USA only.

    So that's about the same as with USI.

  • Hortical (unregistered) in reply to PurpleDog
    PurpleDog:
    Americans aside, did anyone not instantly realise what the problem was? Three years? Get a non-US developer on the job and you'd have the fix within a day.

    Why didn't the french realize this, then? They may not be developers, but none of the people involved even had an inkling? They never mentioned it.

  • (cs)

    Dates (and everything else) should be in order from most general to least. That makes the ISO format superior, and dd/mm/yy one of the worst. The only thing worse than dd/mm/yy is anything with the year in the middle.

  • anand jeyahar (unregistered) in reply to Patrick

    (mid size)(small size) (big size)... That reminds me of the hourglass figure metaphor for women... :-)

  • (cs) in reply to simple
    simple:
    trwtf:
    Larry:
    Nagesh:
    I am glad TDWTF is finaly be coming back after skiping bogus selebration of ejection British.
    TRWTF is foreign tech support.

    Le TRWTF, c'est les Frogs.

    Unneccessary "Le" - Stands for "The"

    "Le vrai quoi le foutre" maybe?

  • HP PhaserJet (unregistered) in reply to Zebedee
    Zebedee:
    That's interesting, most people in the UK would say two thousand and eleven. How would you say the year 2000, twenty-hundred?

    You're misunderstanding the pattern, the pattern is what way is shortest.

    We'd say it "Two-thou-sand" because it has fewer syllables than "Twen-ty-hund-red".

    And we say "Twen-ty-ele-ven" because it has fewer syllables than "Two-thou-sand-and-ele-ven".

    When it comes to informal language, I think this shortest-way pattern is acceptable. You just used a contraction. Are you going to start throwing apostrophe's everywhere.

  • eVil (unregistered)

    In this thread, a bunch of Americans and a bunch of Europeans hate each other in the least confrontational way they possibly can (regional date standards).

    Kudos to the anyone who realises that you can get intelligent, capable people on both sides of the Atlantic. And idiots. Both sides have lots of idiots.

    I propse, instead of this silly patriotism, that instead we all agree that developers are awesome, and everyone else is foolish.

    Yeah, that'll work.

  • HP PhaserJet (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous non Coward
    Anonymous non Coward:
    "Most common usage See also: Category:Date and time representation by country [edit] Date See also: Date format by country

    In terms of dates, most countries use the "day month year" format. In terms of people the big-endian form is also very common, since that is used in East Asia, Iran and partially in India."

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

    Medium Indian is roughly use , in ... The USA only.

    So that's about the same as with USI.

    What's "Medium Indian"?

  • Francois Botha (unregistered) in reply to luptatum

    After hitting similar mm/dd vs dd/mm problems 10 years ago, I now ALWAYS use ISO-8601. My problem is to persuade the rest of the world to do it too. It saves such a lot of problems.

  • Svenson (unregistered) in reply to Excelsior
    Excelsior:
    Well, I'm French and I'll say it out loud : "TRWTF is that you, american are not using our date format !!"

    Err... Okay, don't stab me now, maybe the problem is that we are using a fancy date format just to make it clear we are unique.

    We have our own Keyboard layout (ain't it lame ?), we are using GMT+1 even if the Greenwich meridian crosses our land, and there are so much things we can't do like everybody (we even speak french, and we think it's a better french than Canadian speak).

    However, you shall keep in mind we, french developers, are always hassled with date formatting problems, here's TRWTF.

    Have a good evening !

    You have a good evening too! Between the odd time zone, summer time, and the latitude, the sun is still up at 10 PM in Paris right now. After all, you are in the same time zone as Lisbon (Portugal) and Stockholm (Sweden).

    b.t.w. I only know maybe 100 words of French, but I can hear the difference between metropolitan French and the Quebecois accent -- those Canadians are REALLY hard to understand.

  • (cs) in reply to Matt Westwood
    Matt Westwood:
    simple:
    trwtf:
    Larry:
    Nagesh:
    I am glad TDWTF is finaly be coming back after skiping bogus selebration of ejection British.
    TRWTF is foreign tech support.

    Le TRWTF, c'est les Frogs.

    Unneccessary "Le" - Stands for "The"

    "Le vrai quoi le foutre" maybe?

    Probably more accurately gramatically: Le vrai qu'est-ce que tu fous." Any native francophones care to help out?

  • Hortical (unregistered) in reply to eVil
    eVil:
    In this thread, a bunch of Americans and a bunch of Europeans hate each other in the least confrontational way they possibly can (regional date standards).

    Kudos to the anyone who realises that you can get intelligent, capable people on both sides of the Atlantic. And idiots. Both sides have lots of idiots.

    I propse, instead of this silly patriotism, that instead we all agree that developers are awesome, and everyone else is foolish.

    Yeah, that'll work.

    Don't worry, it will all be over soon, when North America is populated mostly by latinos and Europe is the new Caliphate.

    How do civilizations (like The West) die? By slowly rotting from within.

  • Grzes (unregistered) in reply to Meep

    The Belgian bureaucrats aren't that bad. After all, they let me in without forcing me through long, messy and humilating process of visa issuing-or-not. In fact, they don't even require a passport.

    And thanks to Belgian bureaucrats, we are free from software patents, which cripple the individuals and reinforce the large corporations.

    And do you really think your life is not regulated? I doubt.

  • anand jeyahar (unregistered) in reply to Steve The Cynic

    Hmm.. that rules out AZERTY as the layout i wanna try next. I am happy i tried out the DVORAK, but am beginning to think it can be improved. has anybody seen this(http://patorjk.com/keyboard-layout-analyzer/)??

  • (cs) in reply to mohs
    mohs:
    C-Octothorpe:
    kikito:
    There is only One True Date Format and that is yyyy-mm-dd.

    QFT

    my kingdom for instantaneous sortable date values. (Which are more readable than a timestamp

    However the US Format is still much more useless than the formats of any other place in the world.

    Every time I use a date in code and sort it, it works fine with, even though I'm in the US and use the local date format. The real WTF is storing the date as a string with formatting applied instead of formatting it during the output stage.
  • Hortical (unregistered) in reply to M
    M:
    Well, vive la difference! It'd be boring if there were no quibbles and eccentricities that seperated us, if everyone used one system for measuring units, represented the date the same way, and insisted on using the exact same definition of a lb or a pint. There'd be no differences to celebrate, no issue of localisation for developers, and no excuses for why multi-billion dollar spacecraft crash.

    What ever happened to celebrating diversity?

  • Machtyn (unregistered) in reply to Mike
    Mike:
    Even this american non-developer figured out in the first few lines that the problem lie in the backwards dates in the EU. Something was setting system time using the american standard on a french system - tracking it down would be the hard part.

    And certainly should never have taken that long.

    Well, sure, the date reversal is rather obvious. But a report shouldn't be setting the system date. TRWTF is VB - allowing a function name to be a variable and allowing the function name to set a system setting. It's like Microsoft was trying to make things too easy for users.

    ("I know, every student is going to want to set their system date when learning VB. Let's make this easy for them!")

  • CDave (unregistered) in reply to Severity One
    Severity One:
    Well, the typical American unawareness of people in other countries doing things differently (actually, the entire world doing things differently) is an issue, of course. Well, at least we don't get 'Letter' as standard paper format instead of A4. That's the progress over the last 20 years. Now, if we wouldn't be wouldn't be forced to enter our state, (bit useless if you live in a country with just over 400,000 people) that would be really swell.

    But that you can just change the computer's system date with a simple statement? That's seriously messed up.

    What makes you think Americans should conform to the way you do things? Are you really so arrogant that you can't tolerate any other way of doing things other than your own? Every time I see some arrogant pos like this I thank god my ancestors left the "old" country.

  • mtj (unregistered)

    That's some pretty awful troubleshooting on the part of the dev team. If they don't have the thought process to ask themselves 'Is this somehow viable given the language?' I'd be surprised if they ever fixed anything at all.

    (Sure it's a stupid language feature, but the first thing you learn when working with M$ languages is that they've never heard of the principal of least astonishment.)

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