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Comment by shrimp_emoji | Hacker News Reader

Not only that, but any person using middle-endian date format is doing it wrong. It's the least rational way to write something! Little-endian at least has the virtue of just being backwards relative to how you write every other number, but middle-endian is just bonkers. (So of course it's the way Americans do it.)

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Americans use "March 5th" as the verbal form of dates when the context (year) is clear. This actually makes sense -- it puts the most significant part first, and narrows from there. The numeric representation follows that form, becoming "3/5".

But of course for full context, Americans say "March 5th, 2024", yielding "3/5/24" or similar atrocities.

I'm a big fan of ISO 8601. They got this one right. It's clear, non-preferential, and (critically) it sorts lexically with expected results!

But if Americans follow the reasoning to put the most important information first, then why do they say "March 5th, 2024"? With that reasoning shouldn't it be "2024 March 5th"?

For spoken communication you could even extend it to "Anno Domini 2024 March 5th", following the common pattern in spoken language of adding somewhat redundant filler to indicate something worth paying attention to is coming up.

> Anno Domini 2024 March 5th

Gregorian Anno Domini 2024 March 5th. :)

> But if Americans follow the reasoning to put the most important information first, then why do they say "March 5th, 2024"? With that reasoning shouldn't it be "2024 March 5th"?

Because you're falsely equating "important" and "significant". It's not about little endian vs big endian, which is all about magnitudes. Most of the time, the year is implicit (i.e., this year, or perhaps next year but that will be inferred from the month). Rolling over months happens quite often, rolling over years is rare. And in cases where the month really doesn't matter, it'll be dropped: "see you on the 5th!"

That said, I personally dislike both MM-DD-YYYY and DD-MM-YYYY. Mon DD, YYYY is fine. YYYY-MM-DD (ISO8601) is fine (and to be preferred when naming files or in any other context where you'll be seeing lots of dates at once).

I thought so too for most of my life but living in the states has changed my perspective since the practice is coherent with spoken language. Now I mostly write out the month to make it clear. Let me just appeal to all Americans to use slashes as separators and not dots.

Side note: Military format 12MAR24 seems both concise and unbiguous but most people understandably find that unusual (just like ISO dates)

Is that March 24th, 1912?

For many years, I used "12 Mar 2024" in written form.

But the convenience of ISO 8601 for electronic form is compelling, and it has slipped into my writing as well.

The military format is ambiguous. For example, 12MAY24 means 2024-05-12 in English but it means 2024-03-12 in Manx Gaelic [1].

Also, tell me: what date is 10SKÁ11? Or 01DU02?

Furthermore, a lexicographic sort will do the wrong thing.

Better stick with ISO 8601.

[1] https://gv.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayrnt

Yep. Numbers > names, always. I'll go even further: months shouldn't even have names (which no longer even make sense, like October)! Neither should the days of the week, like the Chinese do it.

12MAR24 is so close. If they just went with 12MAR2024 it would have been unambiguous.

Of course it lacks many advantages of ISO8601 like sorting correctly in alphabetical sorting or working across languages, but it's a huge step up from 3/12/24.

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