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Comment by palisade | Hacker News Reader

YMD is the only sane format. When you sort, you can sort by the year, followed by month and day. I do this a lot with folder names or log file names in directories, file system creation/modified dates don't always match reality. e.g. a folder named 2018-01-07 is entirely readable to anyone who looks at it, but at the same time easily sorted.

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And DMY is the only sane human-readable format for LTR languages.

When you write the time, do you put the minutes to the left or the right of the hour?

I think that the timescale on which humans live matters here. The year field doesn't change often, so for the everyday usecase it's kind of redundant – it's probably the current year, so specifying it first is kind of noisy[1]. But on the scale of hours, it's the minutes that are noise, because you likely care more about the hour. So I guess the most ergonomic ordering depends on the usecase.

[1] This could be different if you're, say, browsing an archive. Still, if I'm looking at a thread from 2005, that context is in my head, and I don't need to be constantly reminded of that by seeing 2005-XX-YY.

In English, at least, it used to be that a document such as a letter would begin with a date indicating when it was written, and then for dates ±1 month from that date would express relatively, like so:

* "The 10th instant" / "10th inst." = tenth day of current month indicated in date of document

* "The 10th ultimo" / "10th ult." = tenth day of month preceding the one indicated in date of document

* "The 10th proximo" / "10th prox." = tenth day of month following the one indicated in date of document

Arabic often writes dates and phone numbers from left to right. I can't speak for other RTL langauges but I can't see DMY being a problem for most people around the world. Ultimately, non-English speakers have to learn English to write code and if they want standardised dates across their systems they should use the standard of the language they're writing in.

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