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Comment by sverhagen | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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 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.

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