Why? dd/mm/yyyy isnt practical. If you are asking someone to check out part of a book, you wouldn’t say “paragraph 4, chapter 3”, you start broad and become more specific. Calendars, at least in the US, are organized by month. You have turn turn to the month page before finding the date, it makes more sense to say month first because its the first piece of information that you need (unless its a more rare case that you are talking about an event in another year).
Im sure programmers prefer something different, but humans shouldn’t have to communicate differently to make computing easier. Computing exists to make human life easier, not the other way around.
mm/dd/yyyy is horrendous and inconsistent, you can argue that yyyy/mm/dd is correct, but for daily use dd/mm/yyyy is way better
For daily use — like, if someone asks me the date — I don’t normally bother telling them the year anyway (nor the month, for that matter). But for situations wherein the year is important enough to mention, year/month/day all the way.
We regularly back load the context in English.
I wish US Americans would do this, but when I try to use it, it’s too ambiguous with our mm/dd/yyyy format that already exists. So, I think the US will have to go with YYYYMMDD. That’s the most straightforward and easy to understand method of switching to an entirely numeric date sequence that is logical.
I meant to say i love month-day-year. August 5, 2026. I love day-month-year too, more than I like month-day-year
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Year day month is the only acceptable format.
so how’s the murder rate in heathen land
You’re thinking to hard. The best way to write a date is Julian. Today is 26216.
So… this Julian… is he a friend of yours?
Ew.
yyyymmdd
Tis the Canadian way.
YYYY-MM-DDISO 8601 my beloved
In fact the Linux date command even has an iso flag:
date --iso-8601
Yep and it needs to use hyphens and not slashes. It helps avoid missed typos or mis-reads in some situations, especially if hand-written.
and it’s perfectly sortable
oh yeah. There are numerous benefits to the format itself, outside the question of hyphens vs slashes.
I find the sortability quite satisfying, but also as somebody living in the US, I also like that it’s unambiguous regardless of my audience. Hell, half the time I see people hand-write a date on something they don’t even use a year.
There are also variants with single dots too. I sometimes do timestamps without any separator too, depending on the context (such as file backups):
YYYYMMDDin example 20260805.I actually used to do single dots in my own file/folder names. It’s probably my favorite way visually, since it’s a minimal separator and as you showed it works without a separator at all.
ISO 8601 or gtfo
other formats are confusing
Good luck sorting anything by date!
AKA typically the single most relevant reason to record one at all. But yes. Most people prefer to begin by thinking about the least significant piece of information, and then go from there.
Date format has nothing to do with sorting by date.
Y-DDD-MM
It is currently 6-004-08
*Tips hat*
Y’dameThis is art.
The one that ends us with f… I mean ISO 8601 of course
I proper shit post would have suggested “mm/dd/yyyy”.
The problem is not the format itself, its just sometimes we don’t know which format is used: 07/07/26
Edit: This was probably a bad example, because it does not matter which format, as it is clear it is 7th of July 2026 in both possible formats. A better example: 01/02/26
Obviously that’s February 26th 2001
01/02/26
Uh, it’s clearly my first 26th birthday at two in the morning
You are so evil! :D
