4 ms·

I submitted a patch to support decimal commas when parsing timestamps in Go in 2013. I thought this was a slam dunk because while major users of decimal dots in

by dmit 6y ago

I submitted a patch to support decimal commas when parsing timestamps in Go in 2013. I thought this was a slam dunk because while major users of decimal dots include USA, China, India, and Japan, the decimal comma is used by pretty much every other country in the world. Going from ~40% support to ~99.9% support seemed like an obvious win. Rob Pike politely declined the patch, commenting "I might prefer to leave it unaddressed for the moment. Proper locale treatment is coming (I hope soon) and this seems like the wrong place to start insinuating special locale handling into the standard library." Three years later another Go team member commented that "Date localization is definitely still in the planning." We're in year 8 now. The issue is still open. Rob Pike is still hoping.

nicoburns 6y ago
This is where Rust's decision to keep such functions out of the standard library entirely starts to look pretty smart.
boogies 6y ago
> ~40% support to ~99.9% support № of countries ≠ № of people though. ⅘ of the 5 most populous countries¹ use decimal points, and together they alone² have ~42½% of the world’s people. Do all decimal point countries together have ≤50%? (Edit: Is it really not “normal” to do things the Anglophone way?) ¹According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... ²Not counting territories
fomine3 6y ago
I found the issue: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/6189 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/6189
tyg13 6y ago
Wow, taking a look at the related issues, they are really hostile towards fixing this particular pain point. I knew Go had a reputation for being condescending and opinionated, but I had no idea it was this bad. https://github.com/golang/go/issues/6189 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/6189 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/26002 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/26002 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/27746 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/27746 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/36145 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/36145

by dmit 6y ago

nicoburns 6y ago

This is where Rust's decision to keep such functions out of the standard library entirely starts to look pretty smart.

boogies 6y ago

> ~40% support to ~99.9% support № of countries ≠ № of people though. ⅘ of the 5 most populous countries¹ use decimal points, and together they alone² have ~42½% of the world’s people. Do all decimal point countries together have ≤50%? (Edit: Is it really not “normal” to do things the Anglophone way?) ¹According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen... ²Not counting territories

fomine3 6y ago

I found the issue: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/6189 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/6189

tyg13 6y ago

Wow, taking a look at the related issues, they are really hostile towards fixing this particular pain point. I knew Go had a reputation for being condescending and opinionated, but I had no idea it was this bad. https://github.com/golang/go/issues/6189 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/6189 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/26002 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/26002 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/27746 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/27746 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/36145 https://github.com/golang/go/issues/36145