[arlort]

I don't think the two are equivalent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_numeral_systems#By_cul...

For the last 2000 years it seems no major civilization used base 12 or 60, almost everyone has been using base 10 and even those who didn't had opted for 20 instead of 12

Moving from decimal to duodecimal would involve a complete break for no practical benefit and at the cost of making interactions with every non adopter hellish

Moving from whatever you had before to metric was a minor break with the past but it was adopted in the first place because the status quo was already hellish

And in the parts of the world that already had a standardized system which they shared with most of their partners this process was already too much and we're still talking about metrication 2½ centuries later

I doubt we could've switched to base 12

In fact when the same people pushing for metric tried to force a decimal calendar (something which was widely standardized and for which the shift added no benefits) it failed badly

[timmb]

Well, except the obvious example of the time for which nobody seems to seriously want to move from base 60.

I was contemplating this the other day. We coders often bang on about the joy of base 16 as pure 2s but what makes 60 so useful is it has so many factors: 2,3,4,5,6,10,12,15,20,30. It means you rarely need to split a minute when you’re dividing up time for everyday use.