No love for DD-YYYY-MM?
Leave them hyphens out though, 20230809
what the fuck did you just fucking say about me you little bitch ill have you know i graduated top of my class in the navy seals and ive been involved in numerous secret raids on alquaeda and i have over 300 confirmed kills i am trained in gorilla warfare and im the top sniper in the entire us armed forces you are nothing to me but just another target i will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this earth mark my fucking words you think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the internet think again fucker as we speak i am contacting my secret network of spies across the usa and your ip is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm maggot the storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life youre fucking dead kid i can be anywhere anytime and i can kill you in over seven hundred ways and thats just with my bare hands not only am i extensively trained in unarmed combat but i have access to the entire arsenal of the united states marine corps and i will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent you little shit if only you could have known what unholy retribution your little clever comment was about to bring down upon you maybe you would have held your fucking tongue but you couldnt you didnt and now youre paying the price you goddamn idiot i will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it youre fucking dead kiddo
Lot of talk of numerics only. The problem there is knowing what format the information is in since clearly there are 3 possibilities. Without context and during certain parts of the month you’re hosed. Best to remove ambiguity and go with the alpha numeric format.
DD MMM YY (or alternatively YYYY)
11 Aug 2023
Ambiguity gone.
There’s no amibuity with year first and done properly like YYYY-MM-DD.
Your reasoning is that the ambiguity exists due to using numbers. The ambiguity is only for 2/3 numerical methods
As monstrous as it is yyyy-mm-dd could also be misconstrued by said unfortunate Americans as yyyy-dd-mm because…well…yeah. As noted elsewhere this dd mmm yyyy format also works nicely in written and verbal communication as 12th of august where no one ever is going to write or speak to each other twenty twenty three august twelfth. So again, more universal and less ambiguous.
The second reason why yyyy-MM-dd is the correct way to write days (beside being sortable by default) is because even Americans doesn’t have any similar format that it can be confused with.
I learned this in my first half year as a programmer I think, somewhere well over a decade back and so far it seems that guy was right.
As monsterous as it is yyyy-mm-dd could also be misconstrued by said unfortunate Americans as yyyy-dd-mm because…well…yeah. As noted elsewhere this dd mmm yyyy format also works nicely in written and verbal communication as 12th of august where no one ever is going to write or speak to each other twenty twenty three august twelfth. So again, more universal and less ambiguous.
Problem is that languages get in the way. Some are pretty similar like 15 ago (Spanish) being 15 Aug (English), but 1 ene (Spanish) aren’t that similar to 1 Jan (English).
And for the usual “But English is used everwhere! I live in X!” crowd: NO, it isn’t. Not everything you see as an “expat” is the same as the actual locals with their own language.
Any date format can be unambiguous as long as it’s the one that everyone agrees on, and all date formats will be ambiguous as long as we have several in use.
I kinda gave up, nowadays when i write a date to someone i specify the date format. Like i will send “01/05/2024 (DD/MM/YYYY)” because it’s the only way to be sure
I really wonder how americans were able to fuck this one up. There are three ways to arrange these and two of them are acceptable!
Edit: Yes, I meant common ways, not combinatorically possible ways.
It’s how the dates are typically said, here. November 6th, 2020 = 11/6/2020. [Edit: I had written 9 instead of 11 for November.] (We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.) It’s easy to use, but I agree that YYYY-MM-DD is vastly superior for organization.
I’m canadian and I’ve always prefered this format for the same reason. 11/6/23 is november 6th 2023, not the 11th of June 2023, that’s weird.
We basically never say the sixth of November. It sounds positively ancient.
When is your independence day, again?
Anyway, in Australia (and, I suspect, other places that use DD/MM/YYYY) we use “{ordinal} of {month}” (11th of August), “{ordinal} {month}” (11th August), and “{month} {ordinal}” (August 11th) pretty much interchangeably. In writing but not in speaking, we also sometimes use “{number} {month}” (11 August). That doesn’t have any bearing on how we write it short form though, because those are different things. It’s not the defence many Americans seem to think it is of their insane method of writing the short form.
It’s not the defence many Americans seem to think it is of their insane method of writing the short form.
I’ve never once been confused about a written date whilst in the US. Your country’s other-side-of-the-Earth flip-floppery on how it uses dates really doesn’t (and shouldn’t) impact our system, which we continue to use because it has proven effective and easy. Trying to stagnate an evolving culture/language is pointless and about as futile as trying to force a river to run backwards. If people start jumbling up how we do it here, like you say Australia does, then that will be right, too.
Where is here that November = 9? Probably somewhere you’ve had a long day
It is a bit of a chicken and egg question though. Because do Americans not say it that way because of the date format or is that the date format because you don’t say it that way?
Because in countries using DD.MM.YY we absolutely do say 6th of November.
Do people outside of the US not say dates like “June first” etc? M/D/Y matches that. It’s really not weird at all, even if the international ambiguity is awful.
Yes it is objectively weird.
When you write down “07/01/1967” are you unaware that it is unclear whether you’re referring to July 1st or January 7th?
And despite the fact that you’re writing something down for the express purpose of communicating information, and you’re choosing to shorten it’s written format to save time and space, you’re ok with either
a) just leaving it ambiguous and communicating poorly
or
b) having to write extra words to give it context, taking up more space than just writing out “July 1st, 1967”?
1967/06/01 clearly communicates we’re starting with the year and going biggest to smallest time increments. There is no ambiguity as to which order it’s ever in, and it’s far shorter than the full written date.
At a fundamental user experience level, it is objectively nonsensical to choose the American date format when your goals are 1) clearly communicating a date and 2) doing it shorter than writing out the words.
It’s not unclear to americans. “Objectively” is hilarious here. If it’s in the format people expect, then it’s perfectly fine in context. Sorry that US traditions don’t suit your fancy.
It’s definitely confusing in an international context, but well-estsblished conventions don’t change easily.
In Germany we say things like “we meet on the twelfth fifth” (Zwölfter Fünfter), which is the twelfth day of the fifth month. Often times the year is also shortened to only the last two digits, so it could be twelfth fifth twenty-four in dd-mm-yy format.
Of course we also use the names of the months, but sometimes we just number them.
Three ways that people actually use. YYYY-MM-DD, DD-MM-YYYY, and MM-DD-YYYY (ew).
AFAIK no-one does YYYY-DD-MM, DD-YYYY-MM, or MM-YYYY-DD… yet. Don’t let the Americans know about these formats, they might just start using them out of spite.
I’ll avoid those at all cost and go with the new standard of YY-MM-DD-YY. What’s the date today? 20-08-10-23
YYYY-DD-MM, DD-YYYY-MM, or MM-YYYY-DD
What the actual fuck
‘hey man, what date is it today?’ ‘well it’s the 15th of 2023, August’
Twelve ways if you count two-digit years. My nephew was born on 12/12/12 which was convenient.
My grandmother was born in 1896 and lived to be 102, just long enough for the pre-Y2K computer systems in hospitals to think she was a two-year-old.
ISO 8601 gang. You’d never want to describe dates that way but for file management the convenience is massive.
I do. Anything I have to put a datecode on, always gets a stamp of YYYYMMDD.
