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Comment by jacknews | Hacker News Reader

I get it, it's really annoying that there are different formats.

In fact I once nerfed a small database by importing a bunch dates from a csv in the wrong format.

But honestly both formats (M/D/Y and D/M/Y) are wrong, as clear from the clock example: dates should be big-endian; Y/M/D.

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While I agree that big-endian dates are the best solution (if nothing else, because lexical sort puts it in the right order), I think little-endian at least makes sense. The middle-endian format is just absurd.

> lexical sort puts it in the right order

For a few thousand more years, sure!

Ah, the dreaded y10k problem. We really should start planning for that.

AD > BC(E) & 2 BC(E) is before 1 BC(E)

But BCE comes before CE

To be honest, using date formats in Asian languages (Korean/Japanese/Chinese) is probably the best. There is zero confusion, as the word for "month," "day," or "year" proceeds the numbers directly: 2023년 3월 25일 in Korean, or 2023年3月25日 in Chinese (and Japanese?).

> proceeds the numbers

JSYK, a more native phrasing would be "follows the numbers". "Proceeds" would be too easily confused for "precedes".

Yes, but the confusion caused by not knowing which way your writing it makes both ways worthless (unless your audience is strictly IN or OUT of the US - OR - if one number is greater than 12).

It's annoying, and I just ALWAYS use YYYY-MM-DD, and everyone is happy. Please join my cause. If there's one thing we can all agree makes the world just a little better, it's using YYYY-MM-DD to get people used to it.

I do the same.

I'll use YYYY-MM-DD a lot of the time when doing computer related stuff, but out in the wild I'll tend to do little-endian but write the month as three letters. E.g. 26 Mar 2023.

Middle-Endian is how it tends to be said out loud in English. Even in countries that would write 25/3/23, you still usually answer "What day is it?" out loud with "It's March 25th" rather than "It's the 25th of March." And after that point, the year going at the end makes sense because people are generally not asking what year it is. The only thing that makes it confusing at all is Europe choosing to do it differently without a clear way to tell which system is being used in some cases (you could say this about timezones as well, and would be right to complain there as well, but that doesn't mean that someone's particular timezone is "more correct").

In my opinion though, using a number for the month at all is silly. Nobody ever answered "What month is it?" with "Five." A better format would be to use standard 3-letter codes for the month, e.g. MAR:25:23.

This isn't true in British English, at least in my experience. We'd say "25th of March". The "of" would be omitted when writing a sentence, but you'd include it when reading aloud.

Same for Australian English.

Same in India. And not just when speaking or writing English, but in some the regional languages too.

They are both "wrong" compared to big-endian, but M/D/Y is by far the least logical of the three formats.

M/D/Y should never be a default for any software without the user explicitly selecting it or specifying their country.

What do you mean by "wrong?" And why should logic trump practicality? Besides, rightness and wrongness are value judgments. They have nothing to do with logic.

M/D/Y seems to be the most practical because it reflects how dates are spoken in American English. It separates the date (month/day) from the year, which in many cases can be omitted, while also keeping the larger unit, the month, up front.

"wrong" was in reference to the post being replied to.

The majority of English speakers and people in general don't speak American English, so it makes zero sense to default to "M/D/Y", unless the user explicitly states to use American English, over a more logical order, ideally Y-M-D.

Pretty much all defence in this thread of M/D/Y is just American exceptionalism.

YYYY-MM-DD is also abbreviated as MM-DD.

As for practicality, I don't think closely mirroring English grammar makes it any more practical for written communication.

Iso8601 for the win!

2023-03-25=1995

03-25-2023=-2045

And, for fun

    >>> 3/25/2023
    5.931784478497281e-05

Only for dates. It is horribly broken once you start involving timezones.

What isn't horribly broken once you start involving timezones? Also daylight saving (summer) time. What else?

Not if you always use UTC; just stick a Z on the end and be done with it.

I am kinda shocked no one has posted this yet: https://xkcd.com/1179/

I'd much rather have D/M/Y, since then data is ordered by relevance. If I'm seeing a full date, I probably care more about the day than the month, and more about the month than the year. This is just pure bikeshedding tho, both are infinitely better than M/D/Y

I agree with you. Year is least likely to change, then month, so you can pay attention to D, and scan M/Y which I feel takes less attention than other formats

Relevance changes by which time scale you're looking at. If you're looking at the last month, the day is most important. If you're looking at last year, month is probably most important. And for anything beyond a year, year is obviously most important.

Yeah.. the hungarians are F-ed as usual: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Hung...

I tend to do important things in the second half of the month. That way, you don't get an ambiguous 10/09/22 but a less ambiguous 10/17/22. Everybody still needs to be aware which year we are talking about, but you tend to just write day and month anyway, so 10/09 is bad while 10/17 is obvious.

I grew up in a big endian culture and I cannot agree more with your last sentence.

I say whatever floats your boat. Which I guess could be pound-force (lbf).

Slash means "of". D/M/Y or Y-M-D.

Hell, the weird American "write it like you say it month dayeth of year" would be fine if they didn't use slashes. Sure it doesn't sort well but at least it wouldn't be ambiguous. Nobody would be confused if today was written 03-25/2023.

Slash is just a separator. We're weird here in the US.

> Slash means "of".

No, it doesn't. I mean, in certain contexts it can, but it doesn't exclusively in general, any more than it means “and/or” exclusively in general (though, it does mean “and/or” in “and/or” which probably isn’t something you should think about too much.)

It can just be a separator, as it is in American dates.

Fair point about and/or, but there's still a consistent pattern to that usage - also he/she, etc. I'm having trouble coming up with cases besides US dates where it isn't used to mean one of these two things:

"of": like one half (1/2) meaning one of two, or km/h meaning kilometers per hour, or page 14/55. In these contexts it means something within something else. In both cases there's the strong mathematical connotation of a numerator and a denominator.

"or": like in and/or or he/she.

The symbol has clear connotations, and the American date-format deviates from those.

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