The reputation values on a public CV don't have any thousands separators:


Wouldn't this be easier to read (when properly localized, of course)?

with thousands separators

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  • 95
    It might be even easier to read if the values were also right-aligned. – user4151918 Apr 4 '16 at 17:13
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    And you'd think the site names would link to user profiles, but that's a separate topic... – jtbandes Apr 4 '16 at 18:03
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    Bulldoze it and start over. – Qix - MONICA WAS MISTREATED Apr 5 '16 at 3:46
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    I would also like if the type of separater could be an option in the personal preferences. – Trilarion Apr 5 '16 at 19:31
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    A profile option for thousands separators is the definition of feature creep IMHO... – Jeroen Apr 7 '16 at 11:22
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    Allow user to upload image as his profile thousand separator for maximum compatibility. – Tomáš Zato - Reinstate Monica Apr 7 '16 at 15:52

It makes sense. If you go to the user's SO profile page, you see a separator. Why not on the CV? Keeps consistency.

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As a Dutch citizen, I read your proposed reputation for TeX (1,704) as a number between 1 and 2.

You could argue that an international standard is to be used, but most people don't know what this standard is. Therefore, if this is to be added, it must be optional or at the very least configurable.

You cannot argue that the separators should be English separators, just because the website is in English. After all, the separators are meant to be useful to the person reading the page; not to the owner of a network.

My CV is meant to be read by (primarily) Dutch managers, most of which will only have heard of StackExchange as a good medium to find candidates. If these managers are active SE users, they will understand the separators as they're also present on your badge in any post you write, but they aren't.

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    As a US citizen, if I were to see 60.158 and 1.704 as reputation numbers, I would probably realize what's going on, even though in my locality the thousands separator is ,. Anyway, I'm totally in favor of properly localizing these things, and I'm sure the SO team has the tools at their disposal to do it well. – jtbandes Apr 5 '16 at 18:33
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    Of course, they could also use the 60k abbreviated style that appears on SO. – jtbandes Apr 5 '16 at 18:34
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    IMHO using conventions that are not standard to the language you're writing in is even more confusing. Now I know that in English , is always a thousands separator, and . always a decimal separator, and that it's the reverse in Dutch. Simple. But if you start to mix these conventions I will always have to guess what the intention is. I won't be able to tie a rope to it! ;-) – Martin Tournoij Apr 5 '16 at 19:59
  • Right, but then I would want to disable the formatting entirely because I know it will confuse my target audience when enabled. – Stephan Bijzitter Apr 5 '16 at 20:51
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    It sounds like you might be better off writing your CV in Dutch then? I used to maintain two versions (Dutch and English) as the English language skills of many Dutch people isn't as good as they think it is (rampant Dunning-Kruger effect)... It's unfortunate that the current Jobs CV doesn't support this... – Martin Tournoij Apr 6 '16 at 11:04
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    As a Citizen of Rome I demand that proper numeralization be taken into account. If I Have 17 reputation I demand that it be displayed just as it should, as XVII. – hownowbrowncow Apr 6 '16 at 15:56
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    @Carpetsmoker: Actually, sometimes in English , is the thousands separator and . is the decimal separator. It depends on your region. For example, in South Africa , is used as the decimal separator and . is the thousands separator. I imagine this is due to Afrikaans's heritage in Dutch. English is now the dominant/common language in South Africa, and the ,/. convention from Afrikaans/Dutch is still used, even in English contexts. But I agree with jtbandes it should probably be localized (or use the SI abbreviations). – Cornstalks Apr 7 '16 at 0:14
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    As an engineer who works with binary systems, I demand that reputation be represented accordingly. My reputation is currently 75259 (when rendered in your puny decimal format), and I demand that it instead be displayed just as it is stored internally: as 10010010111111011. I'm willing to allow a single space character to be inserted between each nibble, should any feeble humans have trouble parsing such numbers. – eggyal Apr 7 '16 at 10:43
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    I'm also Dutch, but I expect en-US thousands separators on a en-US website... – Jeroen Apr 7 '16 at 11:12
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    In German, the comma is also the decimal point separator. However it would be very weird if that thing alone was localized when everything else is clearly in English. The CV is English, so use English locales everywhere. – poke Apr 7 '16 at 11:27
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    "You cannot argue that the separators should be English separators, just because the website is in English." - I totally disagree with this statement. Site should stick to the rules of the language that is the sites language. That includes math operators too (eg. vector brackets) and other things. – Tomáš Zato - Reinstate Monica Apr 7 '16 at 15:48
  • But what if the user's content is in Dutch, should it still use English separators? @TomášZato – Stephan Bijzitter Apr 7 '16 at 16:45
  • Some people are really down-vote happy. This is a perfectly valid point. – snake_charmer Apr 7 '16 at 17:41
  • @StephanBijzitter I didn't know Carrers are localized. Mine certainly isn't. – Tomáš Zato - Reinstate Monica Apr 7 '16 at 21:20
  • @StephanBijzitter No, of course not. But you can't translate the section names and such, so you'll always have a weird mix of English and Dutch :-/ Adding proper i18n support to the CV would be a good feature, though, but something that should probably be done properly and throughout, rather than just in one place. – Martin Tournoij Apr 8 '16 at 0:18

I think numbers of 4 digits are easier to read without thousands separators than with, but that may be personal. For 5 it doesn't matter that much to me, and there is only a handful of people who have 6.

So to me thousands separators wouldn't add value, in contrast to, for instance, right-aligning the numbers.

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An apostrophe can be used as a thousands separator like

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We could format everything as 3 digits and then use SI units. 123 or 1.23k for ( 1234) or 12.3k etc.

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How about an underscore like Java allows for numeric constants? So 1_024 ?

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  • This is just confusing. It's nice that you can do this in Java (and some other languages, like Ruby), but typing text as if it's a programming language is not a good idea IMHO... – Martin Tournoij Apr 6 '16 at 16:18
  • @Carpetsmoker The people that'll be looking at this will be hiring programmers so it shouldn't be a problem. Or displaying the reputation as hex values even. – Sled Apr 6 '16 at 16:34
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    I'm a programmer, and I find this thoroughly confusing. It's just not something I would expect in written text. In addition to that, most people looking at CVs will be HR folk, not programmers. – Martin Tournoij Apr 6 '16 at 16:40
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    I myself have never seen this format before. So I agree that this would be very confusing for a large part of the CV’s audience. – poke Apr 7 '16 at 11:28

The real question is: If we put thousands separator, which separator (or lack of separator) should be default?

Too many people using English to bother. I think there should be no separator, because for example there are localizations where , is a decimal point symbol, and there are localizations where . is a thousands separator. No separator is the safest one to use.

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  • Why shouldn't it match Stack Overflow? Also, notice that I tagged my question [internationalization] ;) – jtbandes Apr 5 '16 at 17:40
  • You're right, it makes sense. As a side note: you know, in Poland thousands separator is a blank space, so it can really mess up numbers input, for example: 25 111 is one number. 25 111,822 also one number. – user2622016 Apr 5 '16 at 17:52
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    Separators make numbers considerably easier to read, that's why we should have them. This is an English language site, so English separators (1,999.99) are the ones to use. On the other language Stack Overflows like Portuguese and Russian, the correct local separators should be used. Problem solved. – Pekka Apr 5 '16 at 18:04
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    @Pekka웃 "This is an English language site, so English separators" This feels a bit like a very weak statement. This is not an English language site, it's a programming related site that happens to be in English and is visited by many different people from all other the world. I would actually be happy if I could set a preference for showing which kind of separaters I want to see when logged in. After all the purpose of the separaters is to help the viewer. – Trilarion Apr 5 '16 at 19:30
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    @Trilarion that's true - but as long as there is no selection option (which should then probably also apply to dates), the conventions of the English language are arguably the obvious default. IMO it's still vastly better to have slightly strange separators (I frequently get confused by English separators, too, when writing them) than having none at all. – Pekka Apr 5 '16 at 19:35
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    @jtbandes - Can we also localise (localize) the [internationalization] tag as [internationalisation]? ;) – misterManSam Apr 5 '16 at 23:18

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