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Comment by piyh | Hacker News Reader

2022-March-11 is the master date format. No US injected ambiguity and no chance for misintrepretation.

2022-03-11, actually. It's an ISO standard, has no ambiguity, is more language agnostic, and alphabetical sort coincides with chronological sort.

https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html

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

I totally prefer this date format too when I need to be clear and communicate internationally (which is most of the time).

Consider this though: It's not an inherently unambiguous and language agnostic format. It just so happens that there is no country that would write the above date as 2022-11-03. If there was, we'd have the same issue again.

Apparently there are... shudder.

> Gregorian, year–day–month (YDM) This date format is used in Kazakhstan, Latvia, Nepal, and Turkmenistan

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date#Gregorian,_year–...

Lol there goes that dream. No date format left for us.

i use 2022-03mar-11 or 202203mar11

it most importantly sorts properly when used at the front of a filename, and it's surprisingly easy to read; and in context I'm mostly looking at the month-date which can be picked off the end, "march 11" which is how we say dates in English anyway

time of day can be appended without messing with the collation (usually i put a space)

>"march 11" which is how we say dates in English anyway

I think every time this topic comes up I come across someone with this misconception - usually from a country that celebrates the 4th of July.

So I agree with your point that the way dates are said varies. But your example isn't very good. That's just the name of the holiday, and should not be used to infer anything else.

I think you're missing the point. In the UK, for example, 2/2 is "the second of February", not "February second".

I understand the point entirely. I said I agree with it.

But at the same time, "Fourth of July" should not be used to infer anything about how Americans say dates. It doesn't help prove that both orders are used for dates.

In the real world, some people say day-month and some say month-day, and the holiday is called "Fourth of July". In a counterfactual world where everyone switched to month-day, the holiday would still be called "Fourth of July". So you can't use "Fourth of July" to demonstrate what people actually use for dates.

I'm not saying Americans say dates like that, I'm saying it's a reason they might consider that other people, or Americans once-upon-a-time, say dates like that.

> I'm saying it's a reason they might consider that other people, or Americans once-upon-a-time, say dates like that.

Once upon a time yes.

So that makes it sort of a reason to think those are still possible, but equally validly it acts as a reason to say nobody does that anymore.

So overall it's entirely reasonable to ignore such ambivalent evidence/"evidence".

Nth of month (with month sometimes elided) is most definitely standard English.

It was a facetious way to refer to the USA, I believe. No other country, AFAIK, uses MM-DD-YYYY (except (former) US possessions).

"The 4th of July" is the name of a holiday that happens on July 4th, a day after July 3rd and a day before July 5th.

Or on the 4th of July, to me.

i just looked up, the "American" confusion: we got our date order from the English long ago. Then the English changed their date order. That must have been most confusing

And month/day is not as confusing as day/month (widely used in Europe) since it doesn't correspond to how we say dates.

moving the year first then using the American MM/DD is the least confusing way to do it

It doesn't correspond to how _you_ say dates; I would write 11/03 for the date, and say "the eleventh of March", so it's internally consistent.

Not trying to argue one way or the other, just adding some extra context.

July 2nd

July 3rd

4th of July

July 5th ...

Also my experience is that only Americans say the month first. Today is the 11th of March.

Definitely not. Tons of non-english languages say month first.

We're talking about English

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