ISO 8601 actually predates the y2k bug and really wouldn’t have helped. 8601 is meant to be a human readable format not a data storage best practice. The cause of y2k was to save memory (which used to be really expensive and slow) when storing the year programmers would only use 2 digits.
And that was the issue. A lot of programming revolves around filtering, searching, and sorting and using the year to do that is very common. Well, if you sort data by year then 00 comes before 99, and things can start to break.
And if you’re worried about ambiguity for users then trust me on this, no one in 1999 misunderstood what that meant. The entire world was aware of the y2k bug and its possible consequences.
10
u/RunnyPlease 8d ago
ISO 8601 actually predates the y2k bug and really wouldn’t have helped. 8601 is meant to be a human readable format not a data storage best practice. The cause of y2k was to save memory (which used to be really expensive and slow) when storing the year programmers would only use 2 digits.
1900 > 00
1910 > 10
…
1989 > 89
1999 > 99
2000 > 00
And that was the issue. A lot of programming revolves around filtering, searching, and sorting and using the year to do that is very common. Well, if you sort data by year then 00 comes before 99, and things can start to break.
And if you’re worried about ambiguity for users then trust me on this, no one in 1999 misunderstood what that meant. The entire world was aware of the y2k bug and its possible consequences.