Comments on DateCode

1. ## 9 Comments. ### Don't edit someone else's signed and dated text. If you disagree with something in such text, add something to the page's comments, like this.

-- RonHaleEvans 2011-06-09 01:41 UTC

This is ludicrous. What's the point? Apart from wasting all those "excess" brain cycles that smart people have. If you need to sort chronologically, simply put the year first, followed by month, eg 2011/06/19, or just 20110619. It may be a couple more characters than the compact codebut it's a lot clearer, clarity being a mark of intelligence, in my experience. Of course if the point of the "code" is obfuscation, then stay with it, it works well!

-- jack 2011-06-19 14:31 UTC

I more or less agree. I actually don't use this system myself. I tried it for a couple of weeks and decided I could gain almost all the benefits like sortability from creating dates like 110623 (today's date). If I want to clarify the day of the week, I write 110623R (the R distinguishes ThuRsday? from Tuesday), and if I want "version control" or am numbering pages. I start with 110623Ra and move to 110623Rb and so on. It still sorts, but it's much clearer.

The thing you don't understand about Sharp's code is that it was created a long time ago when every byte mattered in computer memory. The point wasn't obfuscation, but storage savings.

-- RonHaleEvans 2011-06-23 20:59 UTC

In case you're not clear about this, I didn't write the date code article, only the comment at the bottom. The original material was emailed to me by a gentleman of a certain age who didn't know how to use the wiki and wasn't particularly interested in learning, so I added it for him, hoping people would take it and run with it. As for the vintage of the technique, here's an excerpt from our correspondence (this is Sharp speaking): "Not to labor the point, but I originally designed this system for CP/M, which used 8 character names. An additional letter would have been quite a burden, in fact my first system used a 3 character date code."

I decided to give this technique a chance at memetic survival, even though it's at least 40 years old on the face of it. After all, the Art of Memory is thousands of years old, and people are still developing new twists on that. :)

-- RonHaleEvans 2011-06-23 21:22 UTC

I really enjoy this type of date formatting. It works well for my files. I have created a program in Ruby to decode dates like these: https://gist.github.com/2763152

-- Anonymous 2013-01-09 04:58 UTC

Nice work! I intend to finally ship my own date and time app this year, and Sharp is one of the formats it generates. Too bad your code is in Ruby and mine is in a VB clone.

-- RonHaleEvans 2013-01-12 08:44 UTC