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.
Not really, most countries use YYYY-MM-DD to save documents, photos or archive papers.
DD-MM-YYYY is for daily usage.
DD/MM/YYYY is the best in my opinion
I agree with this because if you were to say the whole thing verbally, you generally start with the day, the month then the year.
"It is the 9th of August in the year of our Lord 2023."
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.
09.08.2023 (dd/mm/yyyy) anybody?
I like it for reading and using the date day to day
But yyy-mm-dd is best for sorting and archiving files
This
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.
It's dd/MM/yyyy you nincompoop
ISO 8601 or nothing. Descending order of granularity, keep everything sorted as it should be!
My personal preference is DD-MM-AAAA, but as someone that works with lots of data from different formats and timezones... I have to agree with you...
YYYYMMDD and UTC should be the global default.
annum annum annum annum
Aug 9, 2023and08/09/23literally say the same thing.08/09/23 literally says the 8th day of september.
That’s why I write 9 Aug ‘23
No, the second one says "Sept. 8th 2023" and that last panel is obviously British (you can tell by the teeth) /s
Can’t believe relevant xkcd hasn’t been posted.
The last two are the same thing though
The last one is ambiguous because it could be either august ninth or september eigth.
Reddit ass post
I swear, a lot of you would have no joy in life if you weren't able to bitch about the stupidest shit.
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
09/08/2023 (I'm an American who doesn't care what everyone in my country uses if that "custom" is nonsense...)
Im a Canadian, and unfortunetely we use both formats, with no context.
Which is why written down or typed without a format prompt I use "12 Aug 2023"
Do you use metric? :)
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.
9AUG2023
HOLY
Unix time is the best format
Amount of seconds since midnight Jan 1st 1970 or sod off
Only until 2038-01-19
Date stamps are stupid, but they're nowhere near as stupid as this attempt to criticize them
13/AUG/2023
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.
The way I see it, the US just writes it the way it's spoken. "August 9th, 2023" vs. "the 9th of August, 2023".
Sorry, guess I forgot about that classic American holiday, July 4th
That is indeed how many Americans say it.
That also doesn't make a lot of sense though, does it. In my language, the day comes first. Also when spoken.
It does in real English too.
These are the right dates
The first and the last date format are terrible because you can confuse the day of the month with the number of the month.
I only like date formats where it's not possible to confuse any field, like 8 Aug 2023. I minimize ambiguity.
If the date is in a file name, I make an exception using 2023-08-09 such that a string sort is equal to a date sort.
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?"
23/12/08
Canada moment
This triggers on so many levels. Why do Americans hate logic
😡
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
YYYY-MM-DD is best when programming because it's unambiguous and it makes sorting easier. For humans DD-MM-YYYY is indeed the most sensible.
Most sensible is a matter of opinion
If you're talking dd/mm then mm/dd makes more sense, like a clock.
Oh no! A country uses a different date format, the horror!
🧐 4 Days ago
Nah the middle one is the easiest to read.
I like to think of the American style as machete ordering for dates.
Alright, then I guess change the way you read a clock too... My day to day use doesn't include the year at all. Just mm/dd
Why change the way you read a clock? year/month/day hour:minute:second
You would never read a clock as minute:second:hour, which is analagous to how Americans phrase dates.
The 12-hour system is similar to this issue
Lot of people say "half passed" or "quarter 'til" and optionally include the hour.
I don't, but some people do.
One of my biggest gripes when I worked at Walmart in the claims dept.
I would always have to double check items because some are sources from the US and use the US date format while the rest is in the normal format.
BB really needs to have what format was used or labels need to be printed for US sources pantry items.
ISO standards... unbelievable how many people don't get it!
It's by smallest integer to largest, what's weird about that?
12 months a year, up to 31 days a month and X number of years. It makes the most sense
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)
It should be ordered by significance (ideally descending). USA's date is like putting the million between the thousands and the unit.
Months are dumb. Inconsistent lengths, the names are out of sync (OCTober isn't month 8), pretend to be based on lunar cycles but not, etc.
Give us Year/Day date formats. Extra new year holiday on leap years.
You can blame that on the Romans. October was the eighth month.
In theory yes stupid, in practice I've never been confused once. Its fine guys, why's it such a massive issue for everyone?
My clock says the time is 45:09:00. Should feel so natural to anyone in the US, right?
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Americans write the date the way we would say it. August 9th 2023.
9th of August, 2023
No need for the extra "of"
4th of July
That's a holiday and an obvious exception. Most people don't go around saying dates like that
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."
That's in response to a poorly asked question.
"Hey what's the date?
"August 13th"
(1-12)/(1-31)/(XXXX)
I don't think it's an entirely ridiculous format.
