
Why is January 1 being reported as the last week of the previous year? - ingve
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2015/11/12/10653906.aspx
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Jedd
Bizarre. The author seems to be implying that only one definition of the first
day of a week can be tolerated (and that his is implicitly the correct one),
and later in the comments field that it's intolerable that the 1st of January
could ever not be in the first week of a given year.

ISO8601 [1] is pretty clear on how you determine the first week (as noted on
the wikipedia page, these are functionally equivalent) :

o the week with the year's first Thursday in it (the formal ISO definition),

o the week with 4 January in it,

o the first week with the majority (four or more) of its days in the starting
year, and

o the week starting with the Monday in the period 29 December – 4 January.

While it's doubtless fun to scream into the wind (of International Standards),
and perhaps we may churlishly expect MS to instinctively resist anything
labelled as a standard, comments like this:

    
    
      > The customer wants to know if there is anything we can do so we
      > get the correct result. 
    

are somewhat distressing.

The customer already has the correct result, just neither party understands
what the correct result should be.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601)

~~~
Arnavion
I assume you're new to his blog. For regular readers it is clear it's humor /
sarcasm.

Edit: And I'm not sure how ISO8601's definition of the first week is relevant
to a discussion of dates in a particular culture (Danish).

~~~
Jedd
First time I've read any of his writing. Initial thought was it must be an
attempt at humour, but bits of it read as a genuine gripe (perhaps veiled in
humour). Poe's Law applies heavily in these situations (intersection of
Microsoft, US world views, international standards, Europe).

ISO8601's definition of the first week is particularly relevant, as many of
his comments relate to when a week starts (he believes it starts on a Sunday),
and when the first week of the year starts (AFAICT he seems to think it's
whatever week has the 1st of January in it).

The 'dates in a particular culture' is the entirety of what this article is
about. The 'Danish culture' doesn't treat dates peculiarly - they align with
ISO8601 by the looks of it. It seems to be more of a discussion of dates in
the US culture.

~~~
Joeri
I work on software that's used globally. We've found that ISO week conventions
(starts on Monday, day-month-year, week numbering as described in the article)
are good enough for everyone except the US. We have just two settings for our
date system: ISO and US. I think the US has a peculiar attitude towards
standards. You also see it with miles vs kilometers, Fahrenheit vs Celsius,
and a bunch of more obscure standards particular to our industry. It takes
more effort to make our software ready for the US than for the rest of the
world combined. (Although admittedly we don't support right-to-left.)

------
astrange
> System.Threading.Thread.CurrentThread.CurrentCulture = new CultureInfo("da-
> DK");

Doesn't reading this line just make you feel so /organized/? I've never been
so reassured that what I'm setting really is an official thread-local static
in the official system threads library.

------
Tharkun
Not sure about MS languages, but some date utils make the distinction: week of
year (1/1=1) or week (1/1~=53).

Same with year of week vs year, where 1/1 could be year-1 if the year starts
in the middle of the week, for instance.

Yes, dates suck.

~~~
Gys
In general when there is an ambiguity about something we come up with a
standard. For example, at some point in history we standardized the names for
the days of the week (language depended). For numbers of the week there is
ISO8601. In Europe widely accepted.

