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Comment by reificator | Hacker News Reader

Yet more reason to use the objectively correct date format.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Dates

That is the right format but 'normal people' assume context first so the 12th of January without further context indicates the present year and the 12th of January 2019 or just '19 is enough to disambiguate. The ISO date code was created with computers in mind (sort order) but real people are not computers and besides that there are quite a few other date systems in the world so it is biased to Gregorian anyway.

> so called 'normal people' ... context first ... indicates the present year

If I refer to 12th of January during Christmas, do I refer to the one that is just a few weeks away or the one that is in the present year?

Again, that is a context thing. If you are talking about your sons upcoming birthday that would be the nearest one. I rarely see people referring to events by the exact date if it isn't some momentous occasion (9/11 ... but what year?), or to plan something.

If you typically refer to all days of the year past when the upcoming one is very close then you'd probably make that plain with some note on context. If not you might find yourself with an unscheduled party on your hands :)

I think it's a small hurdle to overcome. Our visual parsing routine can be updated to read YYYY-MM-DD focusing on the rightmost digits, if those are what's important.

How is it more "objectively correct" than DD-MM-YYYY?

Because its unambiguous -- DD-MM-YYYY could be confused for MM-DD-YYYY

I personally prefer to spell out the first three letters of the name of the month to reduce ambiguity, this works well across all regions in the world I do business with.

How can you confuse 31-12-2019 ?

Unless you plan to use one format until 12th of each Month and a different format between 13th and 31st, your objection doesn't seem relevant.

10-11-2019 and 11-10-2019

Obviously you can't, because you cherry picked a non-confusing date.

But you can easily confuse 01-02-2020 or 03-01-2020.

Little endian is obviously heretic, in left-to-right languages.

ASCII sorting order is chronological order.

I would note that the first letter of "ASCII" stands for "American".

Is there any language/locale/whatever that both (1) uses Arabic numerals and (2) does not sort the numerals in the same way ASCII does?

You're right. I was thinking that you need the dash to sort in the right order, but of course the dash is always in the same place in ISO 8601.

For the same reasons the time format HH:MM:SS is objectively correct and and not HH:SS:MM, SS:MM:HH, MM:SS:HH, SS:HH:MM, or MM:HH:SS.

No, dates are for humans not computers sorting things. DD-MM-YYYY is "objectively better" because that's how most humans read dates. See where this is going?

How is it more "objectively correct" than DD-MM-YYYY?

Because the I in ISO means International, so it's automatically better on HN.

It's why the people on HN go to International House of Pancakes so much, but wouldn't be caught dead in The Pancake House.

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