Rubenerd

Go’s date formats are a special beast, as everyone else already realised a decade ago. I’m not a Go developer, but I do use a few devops and blogging tools written in it, and as such I work regularly with its unconventional date representation.

Unlike other languages, Go works against a reference date which you refactor to get the format you’re after:

Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 -0700 MST 2006

I can see the appeal of this rather than an alphabet soup like strftime, even though I committed most of that to memory by now. It’s more WYSIWYG, and easier to visualise in something like a template.

I always wanted to know why this specific date, for reasons I’ll get to in a moment. It lead me to this old Hacker News thread from 2015, and a quote from the documentation that shows this ascending mnemonic:

Mon Jan 2 15:04:05 -0700 MST 2006
0   1   2  3  4  5              6

But there are some assumptions and i17n drawbacks here. Non-American readers would have immediately spotted a problem: we generally don’t put months first. Most of us would write long dates like this:

Mon 2 Jan 15:04:05 -0700 MST 2006
0   2 1    3  4  5              6

It’s not a big deal, the mnemonic holds even though it doesn’t have the elegant ascending numbers anymore. But it’s a bit weird.

The far bigger problem comes when you want to validate short dates. Americans use MM-DD-YYYY, whereas the rest of us use DD-MM-YYYY. At a glance, will this render as the first of February, or the second of January?

02-01-2021

Using a day (02) and a month (01) that can be easily confused is, to use the Shakespearean term, a huge pain in the asp. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve looked at a template and had to do a double-take on the date, or troubleshooting why the months on a page are all wrong.

Conventional wisdom in documentation is to always use a day greater than 12 to remove global ambiguity. The order of this date looks wrong to me, but at least it’s mutually intelligible:

01-27-2021

We’d all be using YYYY-MM-DD in an ideal world, but alas we’re all stuck in meatspace. I’ll continue to work around this, but it’s disappointing that such a high-profile tool would make this difficult to satisfy a mnemonic that doesn’t even hold that well outside the US.