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Comment by gtirloni | Hacker News Reader

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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