27 Feb 2013 is unambiguous- regardless of where you’re from or how you write your dates, you can’t confuse 2013 for the month or day, you can’t confuse Feb for a day or week, and if you can’t figure 27 out, then we have bigger problems!
Not the month, the day - What’s today’s actual date?
Like I was saying, if you’d let me finish, “2025 - 02 - 27”
I’m mostly joking, but when it comes to info about dates, I think the most evctive format it one that organizes the information within a heirachy that provides follow up answers.
Formatting dates as day / month / year does just that.
Provides the day it is, followed by the month and year as that is the order that information is usually needed in.
I find providing the year first (or month) is much more ambiguous as neither are the day the actual date falls on.
Counterpoint: What you say applies in daily life, not when querying an archive of any kind. Year-month-day is the natural sorting order if the question is “which file/folder/column in the spreadsheet is the one I need?” In which case you narrow it down to first the year, then the month, then the day.
I started using YYYY-MM-DD to name files and directories once I noticed that they then became automatically sorted chronologically when I sort the containing directory alphabetically by file name.
If you need to ask for the current date so often, I suggest getting a watch. (not sure if joking vs predisposed for this part)
If you’re asking so often about recent things then, yes, hearing the redundant parts out loud is only irksome because they’ve already been delivered to you (by yourself).
On the other hand, if you’re asking someone when an arbitrary event happened (e.g. when reminiscing), having the year first quickens context.
I used to work for a company that agreed with you, well at least some clown in management did. Even though it was an Australian company, at least part of the problem was we had an office in Manila, and they speak “American English” which seemed to include the awful date system too.
We dealt with a lot of files being issued to clients / received from vendors etc. Because the “official” system used those fucked up dates, everyone ran their own secondary sets of data folders in / out with everything done in ISO dates so you could actually sort it properly.
27 Feb 2013 is unambiguous- regardless of where you’re from or how you write your dates, you can’t confuse 2013 for the month or day, you can’t confuse Feb for a day or week, and if you can’t figure 27 out, then we have bigger problems!
2013-02-27 is also unambiguous unless you’re aware of a country that uses year day month, is not?
2013-02-03 though. Someone would fuck it up
Hey what’s today’s date?
It’s 2025 -
No like the DAY?
Yeah, it’s 2025, 02 -
Not the month, the day - What’s today’s actual date?
Like I was saying, if you’d let me finish, “2025 - 02 - 27”
I’m mostly joking, but when it comes to info about dates, I think the most evctive format it one that organizes the information within a heirachy that provides follow up answers.
Formatting dates as day / month / year does just that. Provides the day it is, followed by the month and year as that is the order that information is usually needed in.
I find providing the year first (or month) is much more ambiguous as neither are the day the actual date falls on.
Wow, what a relatable use-case…
I was said that western mindset goes from small scale to larger scale, like 02-05-2025. Hmm, maybe that’s West vs East propaganda material?
We need to get rid of the month/day and just refer to days by number. Today is day 121 in the year 2025, it’s super clear.
Why bother with years, it’s day 1,456,7834
That’s an interesting epoch. Almost, but not quite, 40,000 years ago
Counterpoint: What you say applies in daily life, not when querying an archive of any kind. Year-month-day is the natural sorting order if the question is “which file/folder/column in the spreadsheet is the one I need?” In which case you narrow it down to first the year, then the month, then the day.
I started using YYYY-MM-DD to name files and directories once I noticed that they then became automatically sorted chronologically when I sort the containing directory alphabetically by file name.
If you need to ask for the current date so often, I suggest getting a watch. (not sure if joking vs predisposed for this part)
If you’re asking so often about recent things then, yes, hearing the redundant parts out loud is only irksome because they’ve already been delivered to you (by yourself).
On the other hand, if you’re asking someone when an arbitrary event happened (e.g. when reminiscing), having the year first quickens context.
Time travelers would have to endure a few less awkward moments though.
Which I was the justification used when my work decided to use 2025-May-01.
It’s close enough to the iso date that nobody will be confused but with that 1 extra layer of security blanket to separate months and days.
Of course, that does ruin sorting, so I think it was a bit silly, nobody has ever used yyyyddmm so it’s all a bit theoretical to me.
I used to work for a company that agreed with you, well at least some clown in management did. Even though it was an Australian company, at least part of the problem was we had an office in Manila, and they speak “American English” which seemed to include the awful date system too. We dealt with a lot of files being issued to clients / received from vendors etc. Because the “official” system used those fucked up dates, everyone ran their own secondary sets of data folders in / out with everything done in ISO dates so you could actually sort it properly.
27 Feb is no more or less ambiguous than 02-27. The problems are when you choose a proper example, like 03/02