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> they will certainly have very different formats

Not necessarily; as the article discussed, the format characters are part of a Unicde standard. Apple/Swift Foundation uses the ICU library[0] for the heavy lifting of date formatting, which is certainly widely available (by design).

[0]:http://site.icu-project.org/

That reference seems to be offline at the moment...

I don't think it's widely used. It is great that some standards body took that problem into their scope, but it may take a long while until most languages agree on anything here.

Yeah, what crazy obscure languages expose a binding to strftime???

> I don't think it's widely used.

You may wish to look at this: http://site.icu-project.org/#TOC-Who-Uses-ICU-

Java affected in exactly the same way.

I thought the same; context is everything; this isn't an issue with a date format, but a date format when used by a specific language (or specific languages).