Oh, the joys of middle-endian notation.
But who are we to laugh at them, the American date notation (M-D-Y) is just as weird.
But who are we to laugh at them, the American date notation (M-D-Y) is just as weird.
Some languages (or dialects of English) say "twelve/the twelveth (of) January 2022", so 12-01-2022 is the obvious notation. Many English dialects (the majority, given that it's how America does it?) would say "January twelveth, 2022", so 01-12-2022.
It's not that the notation is spun around, some versions of English just pronounce the dates backwards! This is the exact opposite of the question asked about numbers, where English (usually, mostly) follows the "logical" order.
As language is subjective, I don't think there's a right or wrong way to pronounce and order things. The West doesn't use lakh and crore, but there's no reason why the short scale is any better. People just decided to say things one way and stick to it.
I think that, in some cases, some systems are objectively better than others because they are simpler. YYYY-MM-DD is such a case. Given that it hasn’t ‘won’ globally over others, it seems it is not that much better, though.
hh:mm:ss is one, too, not because no objectively better ones exist, but because none of them get used (using mixed-base base 24, base 60, base 60, plus, when using milliseconds, base 1,000 doesn’t make sense, but we didn’t manage to replace it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time), so we’re stuck with it.
That may have to do with the fact that it breaks down for larger units, anyways. We could have a 10-day week, but for months and years, it’s impossible to avoid things getting messy.
YYYY-MM-DD is probably the clearest way to express dates for computers only because it's not ambiguous and it's easy to sort.
Decimal time was a mistake. We cannot group our 365.24 days given by nature in a round, base 10 number so any attempts to make the entire system decimal is foolish. We could divide the day in 10 hours with each 100 seconds, but that would mean redefining all SI units to use this new second as a base. Distance is defined as the time it takes for light in a vacuum to travel a certain distance, we'd need to change that distance and all other units OR have the "scientific second" and the "metric second".
But I wouldn’t mind to have a lunch at ‘43’ (from 43200) and go home at ‘65’, without redefining SI.
Time for a rant. I recently had to fix a web application where the guy who originally installed it set all the fields to free form text, and dates were a mix of:
- D/M/Y: good, European order.
- Y/M/D: also good, CJK order.
- M/D/Y: who the hell did it, if we never had an American in the project????
- Years with two or four digits. Every time I see a date written with only two digits for the year, I want to kill the motherfucker who did it.
- Months written as numbers, full names, or abbreviations.
Well, at least nobody used Japanese era years, or Roman numerals for months, but any other combination you can think of was there. 600 records, took me several hours because the software is not exactly user friendly and I had to convert each date to its internal representation by hand.
After that, I force every single web form to use date pickers for date fields. But of course text fields are still a mess, maybe I will adopt your approach too ;)
EDIT: I'm sorry if I offended you by equating American English with English. Point taken. I misspoke. The point remains.
If it's going to be all numbers, 1970-01-01 seems like the right way to do it. (RFC3339 is the best time format.)
Beware your unconscious ethnocentricity! Presumably you are American. I am English. English is the language I use.
The D-M-Y format simply follows the order of the words in English. "We" say 4th of January, 1970. Try reading D-M-Y in English and you will quickly realise that it does make perfect sense... D-M-Y feels more natural to us.
I'd say "the fourth of January". Also, quick question - what do you call Independence Day in the USA? :)
Both ways are valid and can sound fine, it just depends on the locale and context.