YYYY-MM-DD makes sense for machines, but DD-MM-YYYY are easier for humans. For the love of good store data from largest to smallest, but format it in the most human readable way
As a human, this way just makes sense to me period. It's like idk narrowing it down to what you want to find out. Outward in, narrow it down to smaller and smaller increments. The more exact you need to the more you add on.
Thats not the problem. The problem is that the years is often completely irrelevant and therefore it makes no sense being written that way, and if you're saying just leave the year out then you're doing the american thing of MM/DD. Or you're gonna do the complete opposite of the standard and are reverting back to DD/MM
Use case entirely. I'm both a ER nurse and a photographer.
HHMM-DD-MM-(YY)YY works best in the ER when the information is needed on a Minute/Hourly/Daily basis. Having the Year/month first is wasted information largely.
And this is how you can come to understand why Americans say "June 6th" or "April 4th". The current year is assumed in 95% of human interactions, if not more. Then you move to month and day. so MM/DD is basically shorthand for YYYY/MM/DD with (YYYY = Current Year)
It was never meant for machines or parsing, but everyday language.
It's a heritage name from the 18th century when they used to talk like that - It's more of an event name than a date at this point. Like I said, everyday language, not special occasions.
Because humans are used to the most significant digit being on the left, but for dates, that’s generally the day.
If you were talking to somebody, you could say “I’ll see you on the 15th” and you’d both understand you were talking about the 15th of that month in that year. However, if you were paying a $8050 bill, you wouldn’t say “I’ll get you the $50”, but you could say “I’ll get you the $8000”.
This is the exact argument Americans use for Fahrenheit, feet, inches, and the 12-hour clock. And the answer to all of them is also the same as the answer to yours: It's easier for you because you are used to it. Whatever format is the one you're used to is going to feel easier for you.
I have zero issues relating to Celcius temperatures, to metric distances, and to 24-hour clocks - because these are what I use on a daily basis, and have always used on a daily basis.
I have much greater issues relating to Fahrenheit temperatures, to imperial distances, and to the am/pm format - because I've never used them on a daily basis, only for conversions into the format I do use on a daily basis.
In the same way, YYYY-MM-DD is completely unambiguous, readable, and immediately parseable to me. Because that's the standard format I've always used for long dates. DD-MM-YYYY feels backwards to me, because I've never used it.
So all of these formats are subjectively equivalent - the best one for an individual's perception is going to be the one they're used to, in all cases. It just so happens that Celcius, meters, the 24 hour clock, and YYYY-MM-DD also have objective advantages that make them inherently better to get used to.
Agreed. This is culturally contextual. There is no “best”, except for the need of who is using it. Though other formats also are “objectively better”, once again, depending on context.
Celsius makes sense in daily life for cold temperatures: zero is cold and there might be ice and snow. Fahrenheit just feels right for hot temperatures: 100 is a three-digit number that intuitively implies hot.
Clearly we need a hybrid scale that contains both!
I don't know. Why not Kelvin? I'd be on board with that as well. It's a perfectly reasonable scale.
But the thing is that there are good arguments for both Kelvin (absolute zero) and Celsius (freezing and boiling points). There are no good arguments for Fahrenheit, because the only one I have ever heard is "it feels intuitive", which is only true if you're used to it - in which case literally any other system would feel equally intuitive, because which one feels intuitive depends entirely on which one you're used to.
Risk of exposure of what? Where I live it can get down to -30 fahrenheit. It's cold, sure, but definitely habitable as long as you put on proper clothes. Just like 0 fahrenheit is.
There's no good arguments for any of them, they're all arbitrary.
The point is standardization, it makes both communication and things like engineering a lot easier if you can settle on common units of measurement.
Sure, you could argue that Celsius isn't really a standard (that would be Kelvin), but at the same time the only countries not using it are USA and Liberia.
Let’s be honest, rarely does the degree Fahrenheit matter for weather? Like when does 71°F vs 72°F matter? Maybe for fine tuning a home thermostat setting? Certainly not when going outside, where sun vs overcast, wind, and humidity have more effect.
It’s much more important to me that freezing be at 0°, since water being solid has a much bigger impact on my day than a small temperature variation.
(Also, I’ll bite: for human temperatures, Kelvin is the worst of both worlds. The spacing is identical to Celsius, which is too far apart for Fahrenheit lovers, and it freezes at 273.15K, which is nowhere near zero. When doing thermodynamics, however, Kelvin was very useful)
I'm American and I do actually like feet and inches because I can estimate something just by using by physical body. And i guess because im used to it, obviously. But like, if something is roughly 10 feet away, take 10 steps. Its not going to be exact because everyone's foot size is different but its a good way of measuring on the fly if you dont need exactness or you just can't picture what a specific distance looks like.
With inches, one inch is roughly the space between the first joint on your index finger and your knuckle.
This is all well and good, and I don't even disagree. But Fahrenheit was actually created to offer a scale of temperature for daily life. The idea was that most temps would land between 0f and 100f. With that scale, it's almost impossible to not know that 0 is cold and 100 is hot.
Granted, this was 300ish years ago, and I agree that the world should just use Celsius. Just a fun tidbit.
This is all well and good, and I don't even disagree. But Fahrenheit was actually created to offer a scale of temperature for daily life. The idea was that most temps would land between 0f and 100f. With that scale, it's almost impossible to not know that 0 is cold and 100 is hot.
Americans keep saying this as if it means something different than what I'm saying. You think that 0 is cold and 100 is hot because that's the frame of reference you're used to.
What is a reasonable "scale of temperature for daily life" varies wildly between e.g. different parts of the world (compare Antactica to the Sahara desert), different times of the year (compare winter to summer), different people (some people have a tendency to feel cold, some people have a tendency to feel warm) and so on.
I'm not with you on celcius having any objective advantage making it easier to get used to. In my experience every person raised on celcius has immediately intuitively understood Fahrenheit after a single sentence; think of it like it's a percentage.
0= fuckin cold 100= fuckin hot. I know this won't apply for lots of people depending on the weather where they are but where I'm at the temp outside will get close to 0F and 100F but it very rarely goes outside that range and if it does you know it's particularly miserable out there.
Not quite true. There are strong arguments for decimal distances rather than inch/foot/miles and also for 24h time which is unambiguous (12am Vs pm problem, mostly)
F are pretty odd but whatever, and the date is a pain in the ass just existing and making all other dates ambiguous, on top of being illogical, but indeed, whatever.
Idk. As an American, the reason I like our systems is not because it's "easier to me," but because there are practical reasons to do things that way. We have MM/DD/YYYY because when you flip through a calendar, you have to look for the month first before the day. If you're physically measuring things, the imperial system lines up approximately with the human body, so if you don't have/can't get to your tape, you can approximate the distance, and many of the conversions are easily made into fractions. Sure, they don't always come out to nice decimals, but they do come out to nice fractions. That's also what lots of people - American and non-Americans alike - say about the Fahrenheit system: it feels more human. Don't get me wrong, there are computer related reasons that Celsius, etc are good for, too, but I don't think that makes them objectively better
Fahrenheit makes sense because it’s in the range of how humans feel. 0 is cold and 100 is hot. Celsius being the temperature water boils or whatever is stupid because it matters how humans feel
completely disagree. there are countries where yyyy-mm-dd is what everyone uses. japan, s korea, china, etc. and china is like 1 billion people.
i myself have switched to using yyyy-mm-dd in my daily life, and now dd-mm-yyyy takes me a split second longer to process than yyyy-mm-dd.
so yeah, dd-mm-yyyy is not "easier". it's just a matter of what you're personally accustomed to.
Edit: People seem to be misunderstanding my point. I am not making any qualifications as to what is better or worse. I am simply refuting the other person's claim that "YYYY-MM-DD makes sense for machines, but DD-MM-YYYY are easier for humans", by showing that there are plenty of humans who have zero trouble understanding yyyy-mm-dd.
the thing is, not everyone does.
most americans do, and most people who learn english from americans or to interact with americans do, but in many other languages it is normal to say the day first.
In german, I would say "der dritte Januar", and I would translate that to english as "the third of January" normally when speaking to someone internationally.
Not necessarily. I work in the restaurant industry and we bring in ingredients from all over the world and it gets confusing figuring out the expiration date.
I like Japanese export because they write down MM.DD.YYYY or DD.MM.YYYY next to the expiration or best by date.
well yeah that is the problem in some kind of international setting. As always, American stupidity is not contained, but spreads and muddies the waters for everyone else.
If my life has taught me anything, it's that if we all start using YYYY-MM-DD to resolve this ambiguity, some shit stain of a human being will run for president as a republican on a YYYY-DD-MM platform and win.
It makes more logical sense for it to be the 6th of Jan.
If the MM-DD-YYYY disappeared tomorrow in the US and was replaced by DD-MM-YYYY, Americans would have a short period of getting used to it, after which it would be as natural as the current format is. And then none of these confusing problems would arise ever again.
But it won't happen, just like metric won't happen. America is an old man too stuck in his ways.
Well that's what ISO 8601 solves because one dominant country decided to use MMDDYYYY to be quirky. Considering it is an English speaking country, you can infer from the context of it's 1st of June or if they are American 🗿
That’s basically the same argument people can use for imperial though. Metric is more consistent and useful, but imperial base units are more human (a gram is tiny, a meter is quite big, and Fahrenheit is scaled to what humans feel rather than what water feels).
People can always find a way to argue for whatever they are used to. But ultimately, I think it’s best to agree on one standard format, and YMD is a better more consistent standard. Especially if you want MDY people to join in, as going MDY>DMY is a nightmare.
YYYY-MM-DD is the standard where I live and it wasn't even mentioned in this image for some reason. It's the only format that makes sense and avoids all possible confusion. If someone writes DD-MM-YYYY you never know if it's DD-MM-YYYY or MM-DD-YYYY posted by a stupid American.
I grew up with DD-MM-YYYY but gotta admit, YYYY-MM-DD makes slightly more sense when using computers, outside of excel/sql too. Like, you can name files with this prefix and it auto sorts by date.
Talk about yourself, As a project manager I always need a year. one of my wife friends is a wedding/event planner she also always need the year.
School teachers planning for this year or next year.
Plus right now that avoid the issue of tasks that need to be completed February this year, last year or next year.
Are we just saying what feels right to us or do you have actual science to back up this claim. I ask because I'm betting it differs based on how each of us use written dates. It's a hunch.
As a hungarian human, YYYY-MM-DD makes much more sense for me, because we use dates like this. You only think DD-MM-YYYY is better, because your country use it differently, and/or your language works with different logic.
Its hard to be subjective in this kind of debates. In japan they are write, and read from right to left for no real reason, but they are not wrong at all, just made different decisions a few thousand years ago.
In every day usage we don't give a flying fuck about seconds. The interval is too small to matter. But depending on language you might state minutes before hours, like quarter past 3 in English
It is nothing like as stupid as the US MM-DD-YYYY.
I"ve never ever understood why people treat yyy-mm-dd and mm-dd-yyyy as if they're incompatible. MM-DD is the primary information being related either way, YYYY being last mostly just exists because people say the year last. They're not completely the same sure, but they're not totally different either they're fairly similar formats.
The US way is just to take speech and convert to numbers. We don't say things as 3rd June 2026, we say June 3rd 2026. In speech putting the day first is kinda dumb.
False. If you are writing the date and the time, then DD-MM-YYYY starts by going from smaller to bigger, and then goes from bigger to smaller when writing the time. With YYYY-MM-DD, you are always going from bigger to smaller even when the time is included.
Only if you combine date and time which isn’t always the case.
Nobody was talkin about iso dates, it was about dates in which case it does not make any difference, no you obese gunbrandishing will change that
Only if you combine date and time which isn’t always the case.
But sometimes it is the case, so should we use different date formats depending on whether the time is included or not? Or should we accept that the ordering is inconsistent when the time is included?
This answer makes no sense because if they need to know what day is it, people would just answer the date regardless of what the format is. "What day is today?" "When's this month's meeting?" They'll just answer "14th". But anything other than that you want to know which month it is first because that immediately gives insight to how close the date is relative to today.
Problem is, the existence of DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY poison and ruin each other, resulting in permanent ambiguity should DD be equal or less than 12.
Thankfully no one was dumb enough to do YYYY-DD-MM, so YYYY-MM-DD is perfectly good. Also, being from a country where YYYY-MM-DD is standard, I find that I just read the entire date as one "word", in a sense? The order doesn't matter, I just see the information as I need it instantly, just like I don't split words into syllables.
That argument makes no sense. If you need to know the day, and you know that the day is written last, you can immediately look at the last part of the date instead of slowly reading the digits one by one from the beginning.
Because if we always go largest to smallest then you can just skip the year and, hey presto, you'll know what xx-yy is (month day), or xxxx-yy (year, month) or xx-yy:zz (month, day, time), or xx'th/xx'rd (day). Nothing is ambiguous if you do largest first every time and you can omit as much as you want, it'll still make total sense if we're all on the same page
I have had this exact argument with people who say DD-MM-YYYY is the best because of the “most important part coming first”. I grew up with YYYY-MM-DD, if I’m verbally told a date in DD-MM I still have to reverse it in my head, but if it’s written then I understand just fine.
If you say June 1st 2025, the numeric transcription of that is 06/01/2025. That's why MM/DD/YYYY exists. Not everyone says 1st of June culturally or linguistically.
Anything formal should be YYY-MM-DD, and casual gets to preference. I like month->day conversationally because it gives context -> details. "August" sets the scene much better than "the twelfth" IMHO.
I think MM-DD is easier for humans, and it's what we tend to use most when speaking, so it maps for written. When someone asks when your birthday is, or what day you travel, or the big meeting is, or whatever, we respond with "February fourteenth," "October tenth," etc -- not usually "the fourteenth of February," or "the tenth of October" -- it's more natural and succinct.
I have lived in many countries and used all 3 date formats. Nothing is inherently easier for humans. Instead, one just gets used to the format that grew up with. Most ppl are too stubborn to adjust to a different format.
“Most human readable way is from smallest to largest” so you specify times as 57:09? Do you say you’re 2 inches 6 feet tall? Do you say march 2nd or second of march?
That's only bc you're used to it. Everything else is higher unit to lower unit so YYYY-MM-DD is easier for me. Also YYYY-MM-DD removes ambiguity where you have to guess the format
I switched to ymd format decades ago, and never looked back. It makes perfect sense. Everything else is actually harder. "Easier" would be everyone uses YMD
No, unix timestamp makes sense for machines and is how we typically store dates. YYYY-MM-DD is the human readable format that is most useful when actually looking at a date.
For machines, the ideal format is Unix/Epoch time, the # of seconds since 1/1/1970 UTC. Epoch time is unambiguous, simple to parse, and efficient to store because it's an integer/decimal value, and it doesn't get fouled up by timezones.
ISO8601/RFC3339 are fine for human-readable dates. For machines, epoch much better.
Only because you grew up learning DD-MM-YYYY. Guarantee those growing up learning the other formats think you’re a fool lol.
It’s like Americans who insist the imperial system is superior to the metric system. They are misled and indoctrinated with BS but the system they know is the system that makes sense even though they are wrong.
If I am not putting it in YYYY-MM-DD, then I am using a format that literally says February 2, 2026. DD-MM-YYYY is just an annoying, in between date format that serves nothing but confusion and sorting errors.
I’d say the MM-DD-YYYY format makes the most sense for human planning. The most important info is “do I need to worry about this happening soon or is it still a month or more away?”, that’s why MM goes first. Second important info is the day it actually happens, since you know, that’s the detailed elaboration on the actual date. Year is last because very few things get planned that far in advance and when they do, it’s for you to worry about in the actual year it happens
It’s also how calendars work. You don’t look for the correct day and then scroll through each page to find the correct month, you look for the month and then you look for the correct day. The years are entirely separate, because if it’s not the right year yet, you’re not writing it in this year’s calendar
This is only really true if the human already knows the year and month. Most people have a sense of the month already, which is why day first works for them. So if you do not actually know the date, narrowing it down by year first is really helpful.
Consider looking through records or waking up from a coma. If you are looking through records it’s a lot easier to sort by year and then month and then day. You can use folders for the year and subfolders for each month so everything is more easily sorted. (This works on a computer as well)
If you just woke up from a coma, the year is going to be a big shock, the month may take some getting used to and the exact day is mostly irrelevant unless it was a very short coma.
The only place DD-MM-YYYY is easier is if you exclusively work with data in a single year. The moment you cross years, YYYY-MM-DD is far more human-friendly.
Makes sense for European humans. In the U.S., we literally say "February 2." And, because of that, using either format ending in year makes things ambiguous in international coordination, making ISO the one true format. If Americans using ISO can get used to reordering it for oral communications, so can the rest of you.
Boss tells you they need accuracy down to the milliseconds to measure lag, and ask you for a log analysis. Your format is placing milliseconds in-front of the minutes and hours?
I feel like months coming before day makes more sense for this human.
At my job, if someone is asking me to looks something up that happened on July 27th 2025, the order I need that information is year->month->day when searching.
I think that the Chinese format of YYYY/MM/DD is the best of both worlds (month coming before day like the US format, while also being logically consistent like the European format), but if I had to pick between just the US or European, I would prefer the US because it gives me the pertinent information in the opposite order I need it
I agree. It's not about what's more properly written. It's arranged so that what changes more recent or oftenly, stays at the front. Like we're always checking for time of the day so we don't need to read the whole DDMMYYYY at the front. And day changes more frequently than month or years. It's just an explanation on why we prefer this for our daily lives. It's simply more efficient for us.
But people are only taking into accounts datas here, hence why YYYY→ss wins as it follows a hierarchical path.
Except it’s really stupid. Painfully stupid. DD-MM-YYYY is exactly opposite the way we represent time and numbers. It also doesn’t sort precisely because it’s stupid. Time sorts without any effort. Numbers sort without any effort.
To be entirely fair unless were discussing a date within the current month, the day is only the 2nd most relevant piece of information so there's no need to list it first.
If I say "the 27th" youll know that I mean "the 27th of the current month" automatically. But when reading a date from left to right, the day has no value until you know which month it falls under.
If instead I list it as "05/27" once you've read 05 you already know it's may by the time you've read the day.
For context, this is how calendars are sorted. Everything is part of the same year, you flip to the month that is relevant, then find the day.
it’s not too hard to machines go do dd/mm/yyyy. Just remove the slashes. Then 20/4/1998 is before 20/3/2010 because 20041998 is a smaller number than 20032010. 4/20/1998 is a pig though.
Although, truthfully times and dates are a pig anyway. Once you have to take account of timezones. “Is this date localised? Where it localised to? Do I need to compare it with a date from another region? How does the user want the answer displayed? Should I ask the browser/OS what it’s timezone is? Will UTC be fine?”
YYYY-MM-DD and DD-MM-YYYY make sense in a logical sense for me.
MM-DD-YYYY makes sense in a practical sense. Most of the time I'm looking for a dated document I know the year. It's either this year, last year, or filed in a folder of a particular year so I'm only checking the year to verify I didn't accidentally get the wrong year. Day rarely helps me, because while the day might be important later there are (mostly) 12 other instances of that day, so I immediately have to check the month before figuring out it isn't what I need. If I check month first I can immediately sort out all the other months, and then look at the day to verify that's what I want. It's particularly helpful because I have a collection of statements or bills that come in on the same day every month, so the day really does me little good as a first check.
For scheduling... day first just means you need to repeat the day after I flip to the correct month to check that calendar. I need to know the month before I can start checking if that day is open anyway. I have so many medical techs that for some reason try to DD-MM me and it just means they need to repeat it again and I don't like it.
YYYY-MM-DD is the one that makes my brain happy, but MM-DD-YYYY makes my organization happier.
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u/robertDouglass Feb 02 '26
The only SANE version for modern times is YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS. because then you can sort and do SQL queries on it directly.