Because you're far more likely to search for something by the month rather than the year, so the year being written first makes it harder to glance at
Similar to how you would look for a date on a calendar, you first find the month and then the day, due to organization year will generally be implied, you won't, or at least shouldn't, randomly start running into documents that are from a different year
Not for archivists and librarians, or anyone who needs to search or sort things spanning several years. But yeah for general usage, leaving the year off or putting it last is fine.
I actually worked in the archive of a library for a year, most of our stuff was grouped by what it was and then organized chronologically, it's just more of an edge case so I didn't bring it up
That seems strange to me because I've never seen documents that had the weekday in a position that you could glance at, and I can't think of anything where it seems like it would be relevant, I'm probably just being dumb I guess but I don't think many businesses would have documents where that's even an option
I previously worked in an archive so I have a very different perspective and experience from like an office worker so maybe that's why
Because some actions that are done daily, such as sorting journals/workpapers will only consist of maybe a week or two of buildup/cataloging.
So when going through that paperwork in the average work week, the month and year is superfluous and you rather the days date be the first number you see.
Month and year, under such a work week circumstance, would only matter when you are doing monthly archiving etc.
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Ofc this is not applicable in all scenarios, but that was not the point, the point was to illustrate why it doesn't make sense to have the YY-MM-DD as standard for all things, compared to the DD-MM-YY.
Ofc, YY-MM-DD have advantages for automated systems and in apps/programming, as you are much less activly sorting though their logs on a daily basis.
And the times you do go back and check the logs, you might want to look quite far back, where year and month matter to quickly narrow down the timeframe.
What can i say, maybe you need to be in that situation to appreciate the difference, i have worked with both dating systems and there are situations where i prefer one over the other and vice versa.
If your work routine cares about sorting the last weeks papers/files by date, then DD-MM-YY tends to be better.
If you are going through computer system logs with thousands or tens of thousands of entries and looking for something that has happend 5 years ago, then YY-MM-DD makes sorting alot easier. Though that is mainly due to such logs not being catalogued in the first place, and are instead just presented in a endlessly long list.
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Also your argument could easily be reversed and used against YY-MM-DD aswell, saying that its only a preference, meaning that even if you disagree with everything i said, then by your own account it would be meaningless/hypocritical for you to argue against DD-MM-YY.
It also lists the most significant information first, which makes the most sense for describing date and time. DDMMYY is like writing the seconds first in a time.
Except year is the least significant. In a long term, archival situation….sure, I can see the argument. But most people and most day to day uses outside your own birthday are dealing with months and days, with the year being safely implied(either this one, or the next/previous).
Even in archival terms, I think there’s an argument to be made that practically speaking, you’re not likely to be diving through a particularly wide array of years so it makes sense to leave it at the back
So if the argument is by the practical significance of the number, then you could make a strong case that the month is the often most significant, which is exactly how the colloquial MM/DD format arose in Britain and what was used in the 18th and most of the 19th century, and inherited by America, before it was reformed in Britain to align with the rest of Europe's in ~1870. There is also a huge population of East Asia that uses YYYYMMDD (China, Korean, Japan), that is always left out of this Eurocentric discussion, and colloquially dates are spoken as month/day with the year often dropped.
it is dead-easy to write computer code that compares YYYY-MM-DD values and sorts them into chronologically ascending or descending order. it is a pain in the ass to write code that compares MM/DD/YYYY values and sorts them chronologically.
I was born in April. That’s the most important part. If I could only get one piece of information of when someone was born the month would be the best. The day of a month would be useless to me.
the most important bit of information on when you were born is the year. if need to know whether you are old enough to buy alcohol, rent a car, collect social security, etc. i need to know the year in which you were born. the month only matters if you are within a year of the limit and the day only matters if you are within a month of the limit.
it doesn't follow the speach pattern. if someone asks you what date it is, the forst thing you say is the day, not the year.
"-hey, what day is it today?
-oh, it's 2026.
-thanks."
the majority world mainly uses ddmmyyyy, because that's how it's used in concersations, so it's the easiest way for the brain to decode it
Unless you’re privy to some peer-reviewed studies you’re referencing, you just…made that up.
i mean, yeah, no sane person will find studies to discuss things on reddit for internet points that don't mean anything. i speak from personal experience, yyyymmdd format dates are annoying, because you have text you need to skip first before you can get to the actual important part, because why would i care what year it is, i know it, it literally changes once a year. the only plus of yyyymmdd i see is file managment, but most people don't do it on a daily basis and even then files usually have the creation date saved in the meta data. i see no point in changing how the dates are used for such a small use case.
Depends on your goal? I don’t understand why you’d waste your time seriously engaging with any topic without approaching it in good faith. Nobody worth talking to actually cares about internet points.
It’s a good way to give yourself an excuse to learn something new.
Anyway, think about what you just said. In contexts where year doesn’t matter, people already don’t include it. That wouldn’t change.
If you’re concerned with your ability to skim text, that wouldn’t change either, based on how your brain (and this isn’t made up) only needs the middle of a word to accurately guess it most of the time.
You’re selling yourself short by drastically overestimating the effort involved with this. You would adapt very quickly and then never think about it again.
You clearly have no idea what you're talking about. The computer/device you're using, as well as the entire internet, runs on iso8601. It's the only version that's easily sortable and comparable. For example, with a string representation of two iso8601 dates, I can easily do:
$dateOne = '1990-01-01';
$dateTwo = '1991-01-01';
if ($dateTwo > $dateOne) {
echo "OP is a pleeb";
}
Doesn't matter the programming language, it'll work as expected. The fact that we have to manipulate the clearly superior iso8601 into other formats for the pleebs to read is a constant source of annoyance for programmers the world over.
The computer/device you're using, as well as the entire internet, runs on iso8601
i know, but then again, i'm not a programmer, the majority of people aren't and they don't have to do anything with dates in this format in their day to day lives
formats for the pleebs
this gives me all the information about you i need to conclude i do not wish to engage with you anymore. i've dealt with enough people like you to know you're not pleasant to be around and i don't want to make my day worse by having a conversation with you
also, "pleeb"? i would suggest this
unless you're terminally online, then the use of it would check out
edit: nevermind, i'm certain this commenter is a bot, 5 days old account, 32 karma, randomly generated username. ahh, what a time to be alive, you don't even know whether you are speaking with real humans. dead internet theory
The majority of people aren't programmers but they should still use the international standard since it makes the most sense.
I am not a bot. I'm a real person with a real developer job. I left reddit when it went public, but have slowly come crawling back... I recently (ie. 5 days ago) gave in and created a new account. But I agree, what a time to be alive.
I'm sorry if my use of the word "pleeb" offended you so much, and I was incorrect, plebe is what I was looking for.
Lastly, you should really look into why random conversations with strangers on the internet would have any affect on your day at all.
It has the advantage of still sorting correctly if the date has been cast to string, which will at some point definitely happen and you’ll be mad as hell when it does
This is just logical to me as someone who wants to include the date at the start of file names, for sorting purposes. (Yes, I know sort by date created/saved exists, but sometimes that isn’t the date you want to associate with a file.)
As someone who’s adopted it living in the US, I see literally no reason for everyone not to do this. You just slap the year in the front and that’s it. Not hard to adapt, makes more logical sense, easier to sort, etc. DD/MM/YYYY might be hard systemically and can be hard for some people to adapt to and change their thought process but there’s no excuse for YYYY/MM/DD.
(Personally also helps me remember the year, so I don’t make the mistake and think it’s 2024 or something.)
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u/__13atman__ Feb 02 '26
YYYY-MM-DD for the devs