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These "arguments by practicality " are almost always just-so stories.

The Hungarians (and presumably the Chinese) have their own just-so stories about why YMD is the most practical order: you use dates mostly when you sort heating bills, invoices, or even fruit preserves, and in all those cases you need to sort by year first.

Australians will tell you a tale about how "day before month" is human-scale, while "month before day" is not. Heck, ask a German why the decimal comma is superior to the decimal point, and you'll hear plenty of practical-sounding reasons. French carpenters will tell you how they use decimal units because those are much more practical than inches. British people will explain how left-hand traffic is the only practical choice (6a41ef).

People are much better at confabulating reasons for sticking with conventions than they are at telling practical and impractical conventions apart. Indeed, if there was one obviously practical choice, there would be no differing conventions for ISO standards to reconcile.

I believe that these conventions (at least for dates) are indeed the most practical for their respective languages.

Take for example "October the third, two thousand nine" (10/3/2009, MDY). In German one would pronounce this as "der dritte Oktober zweitausendneun" (3.10.2009, DMY). In Hungarian "kétezer-kilenc október harmadika" (2009. 10. 03., YMD). All of these pronunciations reflect the order numerical dates are written: using any other convention would simply make them less natural to pronounce.

Now it is certainly not unheard of that the order of pronunciation also changes (see the British "the third of October"), but changing language is a lot harder in some cases impossible without breaking grammar than changing written numerical representations.

Certain orders are grammatically more convenient in certain languages, but that's not the same sense of practical as the one referenced above: cf. "inches are more practical than meters because they have the same spelling in American and British English", vs. "inches are more practical than meters because they're human-scale units".

Sure, date order may be decided based on accidental grammatical features of the target language. But that just reaffirms that "practicality for the common man" is rationalization.

Naturally, the written convention need not affect pronunciation: in the case of numbers, the world standardized on decimals with place values increasing from right to left, but most languages retain their own idiosyncratic ways of naming/reading them This causes negligible friction in practice.

Speaking for the Hungarians: you're right, if you get used to it, you actually don't even notice the leading year if you don't care. The whole thing just seems to be made up. In other words, rationalization of a habit.

Why big endianness is great though, in practice is that most of the time you actually do care about the year when you use the written form AND it's unambigous. The problem with the reverse notations is not that it seems illogical to some people. The problem is that both d/m/y and m/d/y is used and you can't have the faintest idea which one you are looking at.

Now in theory we could have y/d/m, but we fortunately don't, so seeing the first number being a 4 digit one, you know how to interpret the date.

> The Hungarians (and presumably the Chinese) have their own just-so stories about why YMD is the most practical order: you use dates mostly when you sort heating bills, invoices, or even fruit preserves, and in all those cases you need to sort by year first.

I should note that the Hungarians (can't speak for the Chinese) obviously leave out the year when it's clear which year is meant.

This way we can never reach consensus and beat about the bush! Welcome to the bike shed. What color should we paint it with?

30 years ago when most literature was either published recently (newspapers, magazines, etc), or the date of publication was mostly irrelevant (books), your argument makes sense. If you cared at all, what mattered was usually the month and day.

For most of the literature people read in the 21st century, especially this past decade, the year is the most important part. People normally couldn't care less whether something was published 3 days ago or 3 months ago. But knowing whether it was published 3 years ago makes all the difference in the world to its relevancy.

I think I need to labor on my point a bit more.

There are many use cases for dates. From publication date to planning vacation on a calendar. What is the most common use for a date? Calendar, I guess? The most frequently used dates we encounter are within +/- weeks from now. In a day to day use, YYYY is useless.

A calendar is a great example because they usually emphasize the month, week, and day graphically, not typographically.

Another common remaining example might be a bank statement. But what's interesting there is that the dates are in a column and the year disappears. It hardly matters whether the year comes first or last because you don't actually notice it at all unless the year is rolling over--conspicuous change in that column.

But when I'm looking at something lacking implicit context regarding publication date, such as an online magazine article, a YouTube video, or a Tweet, the year is the first thing I'm searching for. Even on HN, the rule is that the year needs to be included in the title if it wasn't published in the current year.

I guess for e-mail the day and month are most important (similar to bank statements), unless you're reading really old messages. But I use mutt with a default mailbox view that doesn't even show the year.

By far the most common use I have for dates is filling out forms. In those cases the year is almost always essential.

Speaking from personal experience, even an American can make an effort to use YYYY-MM-DD in any situation asking for a numeric date, and almost always succeed. The biggest exceptions are forms asking for MM/DD, and online payment forms asking for credit card expiration as MM/YY.

> I hate writing ISO 8601 dates, even though I know it is logical.

Nobody forces you to write ISO 8601 dates but if you want your dates to be easily parseable by humans, why would you write them all in numbers?

3 Nov 2020, 3rd November 2020, Nov 3rd 2020, even something like 2020 Nov 3 is uniquely parseable by humans. Even if the human doesn't know the language of the month, they can still find out what date it is from a Google search.

With 3/10/2020 you never know for sure what date it is.

> I personally prefer inches and feet, they are just human scale dimensions.

Meter, centimeters, and millimeters are human scale dimensions, too. Just because you didn't grow up with them doesn't make them non-human.

Not sure, I grew up in two countries, one metric and one english units. I still prefer inches and feet to describe length. I would like decimeter but no one uses it.

This came up in a r/AskEurope thread and at least some slavic countries use decimeters.

But that's the beauty about easily convertable units. Even if other people use other conventions, the mental process to convert them is almost zero.

Just imagine somebody giving their height just in inches instead of the usual feet and inches?

Could you mentally parse what 76 inches are?

I guess you have basically no problem with 193cm, 1.93m , or "one ninety-three", or even 19.3dm.

English/Australian people used to (still do?) measure their weight in stones and pounds. The average man was "13 stone" which is 182 pounds.

US people measure their weight in pounds, 182lb

So yes, a USian telling their weight to a UKian would be like saying their height in inches.

Kiwi here, we generally only use pounds for the weight of a newborn, unsure why.

We also tend to still refer to height informally in feet and inches.

That's about our only remaining usage of imperial units apart from inches in penis size. We refer to a serving of beer between 425mL to 468mL as a pint, but it's only a descriptive term and not a legal measure.

Agreed, and needless to say, I use metric system at work (engineering).

Now only if we evolved to have 12 fingers, we would have a supercharged metric system in duodecimal (base 12). Far superior to the decimal number system we use today.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal

Well, one of the oldest known systems was already very good. Alas, the Babylonian numeral system didn't completely make it down to us unfortunately.

> laboriously parse YYYY

Really? It's hard to parse the year??

What about when you come across a piece of paper written some time ago, is it not useful to know the year?

> most people convey to others that this box is 12x8x8 inches

"Most people" == nobody outside of the US.

> And no one uses decimeter (10 cm) for some reason which is actually nice since its the size of the index finger

I just measured my index finger. It is 8.45 cm.

> most people convey to others that this box is 12x8x8 inches

Replace inches with cm, I didn't explain it well. Even if it is centimeter, people would tell dimensions to others more than convert them. The point was about frequency of communication between humans vs. frequency of converting units.

You seem to be taking offense that I said something US-centric. I didn't mean that at all.

> Really? It's hard to parse the year??

Is it so hard to write "it is?" Nevertheless, you used a contraction.

You did so entirely unconsciously because that's how langauge works.

Meters are "human scale". To say not is nonsense.

And 3/2. Is that the future or the past? No way to know. Did you miss the meeting, or is it next week?

"No one uses a decimeter"... What bubble do you live in? But please, lecture some more about cultures you don't understand.

I’ve never read anywhere on any product dimensions written in decimeter. Show me one and prove your point.

Show me a tv measured in cups.

The alternate I like to use on forms and such when I know it's likely going to be read by a human is "DD Mon YYYY", e.g.

   1 Feb 2021

This is a bit more human-readable and closer to commonly-used forms of dates while still being completely unambiguous.

I worked on a system once that failed in Sweden when we changed the locale from US.

Someone was getting the date as 01MMMYYYY and using it as a partition name. When the first day of the tenth month happened, everything broke, because it was expecting OCT, not OKT.

Unambiguous but wrong.

With humans reading it, either you need to be unambiguous, so use yyyy-mm-dd, or you don't have to be, so use a format that most of your audience will understand.

> This is a bit more human-readable and closer to commonly-used forms of dates while still being completely unambiguous.

A bit more human readable you say? So 1 фев 2021, 1 Lut 2021, or 2021 فبراير1 are readable to you? I don't know but to me that's just US-centric thinking all over again.

>2021 فبراير1

I was going to ragequit at you for copy+pasting something into google translate, as it's شُبَاط not فبراير.

but TIL, only in the Levant do we say شُبَاط apparently.

That's true, but as I said, I just use this in certain human-read contexts, e.g. paper forms. Which in my part of the word are normally in English.

It's not just about years, and it's already explained in the article. When I see the date "02/03" or "02/03/2021", I can't tell if it means "March the 2nd" or "February the 3rd", because websites and software don't consistently detect (or even care) about my locale.

But if the software show 2021-03-02, I unambiguously know which it is.

Point noted.

We weren't so globally connected just 20 years ago, so if you were in US, you were used to MM/DD format and if you were anywhere else, you were used to DD/MM format. It was all local.

Nonsense. People have been commenting on how these two orderings are confusing for far longer than 20 years. Things made in the United States have had worldwide circulation for quite a while, now. Even if one has WWW tunnel vision, Markus Kuhn's WWW page on ISO 8601 has been around since 1995.

If you’re living in Berlin, it didn’t matter what US date format was 20 years ago. You’re missing the point that the globe is far more connected due to the internet.

No, you are missing the point that the globe was connected due to the Internet for far more than 20 years, as evidenced at least by the fact that one of the more widely known treatises on ISO 8601 on the World Wide Web dates from the middle 1990s. And that's merely the World Wide Web, not the worldwide computer networks and communications systems, where dates have been an issue, that pre-date the WWW. The idea that this issue is new because the world only got connected in the 21st century is baloney. Doubly so: The world got connected so that people in other countries saw each other's conventional date formats long before, and people have been discussing date format ambiguities for far more than 20 years.

Bah, humbug. I moved to Canada almost a dodecade ago and despite all person heights and interior design stuff being denominated in imperial units, getting the hang a grasp of any multiples is no more intuitive than in metric units. Metres work similarly well as feet, that is, not great for nontrivial amounts.

Within a certain range you'll do fine either way. Outside of a certain range you'll always need a measuring tape, or you just had a had a lot of practice, eyeballing and learned habits going in.

I think you have a valid point which is irrelevant to ISO 8601 however. You may be right that common dates are in the same year, but such dates would be most conveniently written without the year number at all. If you need to write the year to your date, either because it's not the current year or it's consistent with other dates with the year number, then the year number is significant and all arguments against ISO 8601 breaks down.

I tried to push ISO to my (US/EU) company many times... it just doesnt work because you only need YYYY once in a while. Instead, we've settled on NATO formats (another US+EU org): 3 Nov 21 or just 3 Nov. It's unambiguous and short --yes, harder to parse and sort, but those are computer problems, always easier to solve than human problems...

"3 Nov" is ambiguous, it could mean 2020-11-03 or 2021-11-03, or any other year. And by the way, "3 Nov 21" is also ambiguous, it could be 2021-11-03 or 1921-11-03. Lots of stuff happened in 1921.

Also, "3 Nov 21" works only as long as everyone speaks a language in which "Nov" actually stands for November. Abbreviations can have false friends in some languages. It's the reason most EU personal documents try to avoid using text as much as possible because it's impractical to write it in 20+ languages.

> Not everything logical works with humans

Works fine for the Chinese and Japanese, and last I checked they were humans.

American English already has this weirdness elsewhere - the $-sign in $15 is read in the "wrong" place and always trips me up when I'm reading something out loud but others will defend that practice to the death

My ¢2: you are %100 right.

No. Every human likely encounters date sorting at some point. And feet and inches aren’t really any more human or natural than 4x5x2 dm or 40x50x20cm. Dividing by 10 isn’t more human either, but adding/removing zeroes or moving a decimal point is certainly easier for the human brain.

Is dm used widely wherever you’re located?

Its a pretty clumsy measurement so perhaps not “frequently” but it’s widely used yes (Scandinavia). For example windows and doors are standardized in dm, so a typical window is a 11x13 and a door is 9x21. It’s going to have some other measurement in reality like 1120x1310mm but the dm measurement is still used to reference the rough size.

Europe and China disagree with you.