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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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'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.

I do the same.

> 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.

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.

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".

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

But BCE comes before CE

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