It's not a U.S./Europe dichotomy. The first day of the week being Sunday is a Judaeo-Christian, and Islamic, thing.
For countries with these as official religions you will find that offically Sunday is still the first day of the week for many purposes. For example: In the U.K., officially still Protestant, a week for the purposes of statutory sick/maternity/paternity pay or national insurance begins on a Sunday. Sunday trading legislation was talking about weeks commencing on Sunday as recently as 1950.
If you think that millennia-old traditions, which you can still find observed in Europe if you look, are weird then academic weeks beginning at noon on Wednesday, examples of which can also be found in both the U.S. and Europe, will probably blow your mind.
> I live in Europe, and find it weird that people can consider the week to start on Sunday.
You are almost certainly neither Portuguese nor Maltese.
In these two European languages, the days of the week are literally numbered as if Sunday were the first day of the week.
Portuguese: Monday is "segunda-feira" which means something like "second market day"
Maltese: Monday is "it-Tnejn", which AFAICT means "the second [day]"
In both languages, most of the other days have similar names, representing their position in a week that starts on Sunday.
What is the relevance of saying that a week starts on a particular day? In the most common usage, the "week" starts on Monday in the United States, and concludes on Friday, to be followed by the "weekend". A calendar week of 7 days does start on Sunday, but who cares? If they changed how the calendars were printed, life would be different in no way.
In parts of the world, weeks of the year are numbered, so that you can talk about things happening "in week 43", and so on. For such a system, it's of course quite important to agree on which day a new week begins. Also (again, as a European) it feels very odd to not have the weekend (Saturday and Sunday) be at the end of the week, but instead "straddle" between two weeks.
I found the original article a bit strange in it's partitioning of the world into { US, Europe, some places }, I feel that is giving ... undue weight to the US convention, but I haven't studied this to see if I'm right.
In the US, weeks are not numbered, and the way to refer to a week is e.g. "the week of the 10th". (If you're talking about a different month, "the week of September 10th".) You would usually name the Monday of the week because the context is usually work-related.
I question whether "Thursday of week 37" is really that much clearer than "Thursday, September 13".
Perhaps it's not, but it is a bit more compact and even more so in my native language, Swedish. The names of months are longer: "September", which is the same word in Swedish has four syllables while the word for week ("vecka") has two.
And sometimes you really want to speak about the entire week without naming a day ("we'll have the first boards week 40, smoke-test and bring-up during week 41, and then start proper development by week 42"), since it's times in the future and you don't want to be too specific but still align work tasks with weeks.
Also (re: a sibling comment) Google Calendar shows week numbers, or can be configured to. For quickly finding out the week number, there's always https://vecka.nu. :)
> Also (re: a sibling comment) Google Calendar shows week numbers, or can be configured to. For quickly finding out the week number, there's always https://vecka.nu. :)
KDE and i3 desktops can be configured for pretty much arbitrary date formats, I always have the KW in there.
Indeed, it isn't. I'm living in a country where my company as well as our (foreign) customers use week numbers all the time. It's painful. My watch doesn't show the week number. A normal calendar doesn't. The company calendars do, but there's never one nearby when I need one. So I have a bookmark in my web browser to a 'week calendar' on the net.
I can use a 'date' command, but the actual +%<something> syntax always disappear from my mind, so I have to look it up. Week numbers is just a pain. You can't even be sure about week 1 or week 52, it depends on the weekdays that year.
If you said that to me at work, I'd understand Monday, because Sunday is not part of the work week.
I'd likely understand it as Monday in other contexts too, because it's very rare for something to start on Sunday. Monday and Saturday are the transition points and thus the logical places to start doing something.
But I might understand it as Sunday if context seemed to point that way. What I'm saying is that nothing is organized according to "the beginning of the week", so the question of which day is the beginning of the week doesn't have any implications.
No hard implications, but it might influence how you number the days (C99's tm_wday uses 0-6 with 0 = Sunday, which suggests a week starting with Sunday, particularly since tm_mon uses 0-11 with 0 = January, but is also compatible with the way the days are numbered in Chinese, with Monday = 1), and it might be related to how you work out which months have 4 weeks and which months have 5 weeks: it's unusual, but some part-time employees get 4 weeks' pay at the end of most months but 5 weeks' pay at the end of some months, bizarrely.
> I mean … I was aware of the fact that the week starts on Sunday in a LOT of other places. But still.
> So Sunday, the first day of the week, is still part of what's called the weekend, right?
I've always interpreted "the weekend" as a shortening of "the weekends." Sunday is at one "end" of the week and Saturday is at the other "end." Sort of like a if you hold a stick out, there's a "near end" and "far end."
Wow. I live in Europe, and find it weird that people can consider the week to start on Sunday.
I guess everything that may appear normal within a cultural frame of reference can be off in another, even the most basic of things!