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Comment by jonpurdy | Hacker News Reader

Came here to complain specifically about this. 2022-02-22 is unambiguous, big endian, and sorts nicely. IDK why society still uses any other date formats considering how international everything is.

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It's because people for hundreds of years have been saying "March second, nineteen sixty two" which they then write out in that order. As a programmer, peoples' frustrations are understandable, but you're a bit naïve if you think even a percentage point of the speaking population of the world knows or is concerned with big endian-ness or sortability. However they speak English, at least in America, in that order, and that's the way they write it. Europeans only got it a little better.

> Europeans only got it a little better.

There is a reasonable argument for little endian dates (as in the least significant information is usually the most relevant as it changes most often), but apart from the "it has been like this forever" I don't see any reasonable argument for middle endian date formats. Then again, the US is notoriously resistant to the metric system too.

Your error is expecting reasonableness. All linguistic conventions are either arbitrary or lost to time, and mostly only exist for tradition's sake.

It's because it matches the way we speak dates aloud. When intended for human consumption, sortability and big-endianness doesn't matter, but matching the way we speak does. Maybe other cultures actually speak dates differently, I don't know, but I have never seen a native English speaker habitually speak dates any differently than "January 1st, 2001".

All that said, I definitely agree with the original complaint, m-dd-yy is an atrocious format. If you're going to use dashes, stick with yyyy-mm-dd. Replacing the dashes with slashes, as in 2/22/22, would have been fine.

“the twenty-sixth of April” would be the way I say today’s date and anecdotally is in common usage in both countries I’ve lived in (the UK and Australia, both using d/m/y). I’d say it’s about as frequent as “April the twenty-sixth” by itself, and definitely more common if you include the day (“Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of April”).

In the UK I think "1st of January" is probably slightly more common than "January the 1st" although you hear both. "January 1st" (no "the") sounds American.

I'm from NZ and it is 100% normal to switch back and forth between "The second of March" and "March the 23rd".

People I have met from Australia, South Africa, the UK, all have the same flexibility.

Oh this is a great point! I'd never realized that. I know that in Spanish (and I assume many of the romance languages) we always say the day first, eg dos de febrero (2nd of February). In American English even though the day first technically is grammatically correct, we pretty much never say it in that order (February 2nd instead of the 2nd of February)

Given that so many (all?) other English speaking nations including the UK usually speak it the other way around and write it day-month-year, I wonder if writing (especially thinking about newspapers here) influenced the way you speak it and not the other way around. March 1st saves space and ink over 1st of March or some other rationale. Someone certainly has already investigated the origin of putting the month first?

Edit: [1] says my hypothesis is most likely wrong, but that the UK just changed it later to match the rest of Europe. So maybe that influenced their way of speaking? In any case, matching the way one speaks doesn't seem to be a strong reason as it's easily adaptable and month names are unambiguous. Interestingly it also quotes that using a purely numeric format is incorrect in any formal use as to not confuse month and day.

[1] https://iso.mit.edu/americanisms/date-format-in-the-united-s...

Old documents from the UK use both formats. There could be a European influence, but it would be from 150 or more years ago.

http://anguline.co.uk/cert/birth.html

I don't think how we speak dates is relevant. We say "hundred and fifty dollars" but still write it as "$150".

So, European in the US, here. I switch my dates stubbornly to DD-MM-YYYY, 'cause that's the only way. Of course I would. But then there's so many US applications that don't adhere to my settings and use MM-DD-YYYY. So then I am still deciphering 05-07-2020-kind of stuff. All. The. Freakin'. Time.

I frequently receive date data in Excel spreadsheets from the UK, but as a US user of Excel, I cannot convince it to interpret the date correctly. It is astonishingly bad at this.

European date format doesn’t make sense either. It still doesn’t sort and the little-endian date is composed of big-endian year, month, and day.

Putting the day first isn’t actually a benefit because you still need the year and month for context.

Any favoritism of the EU format is the same as the US format. Just familiarity.

ISO8601 is the only way.

I agree that the European format is probably not more useful, and you probably convinced me to go change my settings to YYYY-MM-DD. But I _do_ think that the European format makes more _sense_, it being in chronological "magnitude" order.

I can understand that perspective, although I maintain the usage is only preferred because of familiarity.

Since you are already on the fence with ISO8601 I invite you to consider time of day. Would you use second:minute:hour? That is also in (reverse!) “chronological magnitude” order.

I sometimes format dates in documents or emails dd-MMM-yyyy when the audience is international. ie 2-Feb-2022 using the short month form disambiguates the fields and I think avoids mental gymnastics like 'what month is 09 again?' for the reader. (or in my case the finger-counting....)

I can’t wrap my head around a little endian date.

If you want to write the date little endian then you should do the same with the year. So today’s little-endian date is 26-04-2220. Or maybe that is 62-40-2220? Or is it 62-40-2202?

ISO8601 is the only sane date format. Anything else is only favored for familiarity.

Have they not been doing the same with "fourth of July"? Or is this an exception?

Our Independence Day is probably a special case. Clearly language is flexible enough to say all the formats, but the date format we write matches the most common verbalization.

> people for hundreds of years have been saying "March second, nineteen sixty two"

In many other English-speaking countries people usually say "the second of March, nineteen sixty two."

Ides of March vs March Ides....

twelve thirty or half twelve

color or colour

Pretty funny America's most patriotic day is an edge case for something culturally American

We do say "five dollars" while writing "$5", so saying and writing different things is not unheard of.

And endiannes / sorting comes up in real life pretty often - scanning for large numbers in the price list, or finding stuff in the sorts list.

I think if history turned differently, we could have had sane time format in the US.

I write it in that order some of the time… But when I do, I spell out the month because when I say “I was born on June 14th, 1962,” I don’t say I was born on 6/14/62. I also never say 14/6/62. In fact, I almost never say a month’s number in conversation.

If you want to write it out the way it’s spoken, write it out the way its spoken. Mixing the computer’s numbers and the spoken word’s grammar make for misunderstandings, and as a programmer, eliminating misunderstandings is one of my goals.

plus plus to pragmatic - I have settled on 02feb2022 to write, and I do. Occassionally that finds its way into computer programs around here.

Same, but with spaces, and the month always full capitalized. I learned this habit in the Military as an alternative to 20220222. 22 FEB 2022 is nice because it's neither a string of numbers, which is very intimidating to read if it's written out to include hours minutes and seconds, like 20220222122222. It also completely bypasses the argument around month and day because the format includes spelling specific to the month.

If I'm writing a letter or addressing a specific thing in a formal context I chose to "revert" to the Month, Day Year because it's the social standard for the country I am in, and I want to fit into that cultural expectation, but if it's for a business document or normal chatter I think DD MMM YYYY is probably the clearest to both English & Non-English speakers. It eliminates the distractions I'd normally be dealing with when considering if I'm talking to someone out of country or not. It would be really great if it ends up being more widely adopted.

I'm an Australian who occasionally has video chats with Americans overseas for work and regularly plays D&D online at least once a week with friends all over the world.

The only time I've every heard someone say "<Month> <Ordinal>" or "<Month> the <Ordinal>" is when talking with Americans.

Every other time it's always "<Ordinal> of <Month>" or just "<Ordinal>" for short.

The one exception I can think of is a bug in the mssql datetime type (but not date or datetime2) where strings in that format are assumed to be yyyy-dd-mm if the locale dateformat is dmy (e.g. British English).

ISO 8601 is IMO the only sane format.

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