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Comment by ascar | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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....)

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".

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

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.

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