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I've always found M-D-Y apt for many use-cases, because I often know exactly which year is being referred to - I just need to know the month and day. With M-D-Y, that information is immediately presented. It seems like a decent compromise.

For some reason, I'm now thinking about programming for a 'middle-endian' CPU. Maybe it was a compromise between big and small.

While not really useful in any computer sense, M-D-Y matches common English spoken construction "January 4th, 2015" is 1-4-15

You mean common American English. The rest of the world is using 4th January, 2015.

My favorite format is YYYY-MMM-DD. That is, year, 3-letter (english) month, day (i.e. 2013-Nov-29). Only works for people that know the english names for dates, but eliminates ambiguity about which is the day and which is the month.