USA is the edgy teen after moving out of the parents house (Europe) and finally doing stuff their own way. Not because it is practical, but because they feel rebellious.
Majority of the world uses YYYY-MM-DD. Day 1st makes no sense. If you need the month or year it should come 1st. You need to zoom into what you need not select from any number of months with the same day. That would be like putting time with seconds 1st.
We wouldn't in America in most cases. I'd say it's August 9th 2023. I honestly feel like this is such a dumb argument to have because it doesn't matter except for communication with people who use other methods. Now metric vs imperial makes way more sense to me because the metric system is just so much easier for mathematical conversions.
People rarely use them in real life, but ISO 8601 and RFC 3339 (both are almost identical) are the most natural ways of writing date and time. Just like how we write numbers, their components are written from left to right in the decreasing order of significance: yyyy-mm-ddTHH:MM:SS. I like it by default for precisely the reason you mentioned - sorting. It even helps quick visual comparisons.
If you it's the stupidest shit then you never tried to figure out why you can't log in to VPN for 2h just to realize password expired week ago but you looked at the date and thought you still have 3 weeks till expires
I use Fahrenheit just because it's a pain to get everything set to Celsius and other Americans don't understand it. But I use grams, kilos, millilitres, kilometres, etc. Yes. And if someone asks me to guess the length of an object I will give centimetres, and refuse to translate to inches and their stupid fractions.
If it’s a file I want sorted by date the top is good. If I am talking about a date and spelling it out August the 9th of 2023 makes the most sense and seems natural, and if it’s a personal memo or date label on food I just use 08/09 with the zeros so I know it isn’t a fraction unless it’s frozen or shelf stable for long term storage where the year would be useful to know at which point it becomes 8/9/23
I thought everybody used different date formats based on need.
In UK we always say 9th of August 2023, ie the way our dates are written and i would say is more natural haha. Maybe Americans find it more natural the other way around because your dates are other way around. If you use the date system the uk has maybe it would sound more natural to speak perhaps.
I grew up on RuneScape and BBC programming, so I’ve been exposed to both formats for a long time (really fucked me up in spelling). I couldn’t say why August 9th sounds more natural, but it’s probably because most irl folks around me use it. The 9th of August didn’t sound bad, just more artificial, and it’s probably because my exposure to that spoken out was mostly media and pop culture.
No, the US just chose this order and speaks it the same way. I don't speak it this way, you're just used to it (just like everyone is to the way they speak it)
For actually displaying dates to others, I agree that spelling out the month is absolutely preferred. But if space is limited, you're somewhat required to pick a very shortened format, and the US version is dumb, even if that's what you should use when displaying in that locale.
But for working with dates on computers, year-month-day works great, because it's still human readable, is naturally sortable, and makes it easier for serialization.
The first one is conventionally never year-day-month, and if anyone ever sent me a date of 2023-17-08, I would respond with, "What the hell?! Are you being evil on purpose?"
I don't know why you wanted to know year before month or day, I use dd/mm/yyyy sometime I didn't even use yyyy just dd/mm because day change most frequent then month then year
Because it gets horribly fucky when you now have to figure out if a date is actually formatted as MM-DD-YY or DD-MM-YY.
Surely we've all handled reading an expiration date before and have wondered if we're eating something OK or has expired months ago because they chose the other format.
(Honestly, I think both formats are shit, and the only correct way to do dates with numbers only is YYYY-MM-DD. If not, then at least use letters for months, like 30 AUG 2023)
Americans pick up weird habits and then insist that it's the right way. How is August 9th any better than 9th of August when the 9th is a subunit of August and not the other way around?
Another good example is the use of the imperial system. I've heard Americans often declare that it's a better system for manual use compared to the metric system. But the metric system has prefixes that differ consistently by 3 orders of magnitude, whereas the imperial system has rather arbitrary jumps between each successive unit. The metric system needs much less cognitive effort even for manual use.
I can understand that it's a matter of habit for Americans. But it's the lack of acceptance that there is a problem that leads to other problems like crashing a spacecraft onto Mars.
Generally speaking you're usually from 0 to 720 hours in a month: how many time in a year you have to remind people what month they are into vs. the single day?
Guy A: "Hey, what day is it?"
Guy B: "It's Sunday, the 13th."
Guy A: "Of...?" (gesturing to keep going)
Guy B: "Ah, right, we're just 390 hours into August. You may have missed that."