Tbh I don’t really get why people get upset about mm/dd/yyyy vs dd/mm/yyyy. Is it a little weird? Sure, but personally, saying “July 4th, 1776” feels as natural as “the 4th of July, 1776”. The former is more formal, the latter is more casual.
but personally, saying
I don’t understand why it matters how you say the date vs. how it’s written with slashes.
If someone asks you the time, and you look at your watch and it says 11:45, you could just answer “eleven forty five”, but depending on the context you might just say “It’s noon” or “It’s almost noon” or “It’s a quarter to noon”. 11:45 is how you get the information into your brain. How you process that information and how you pass it on depends on the context.
The best date format is clearly ISO-8601, YYYY-MM-DD. In that format, US independence day is 1776-07-04. But, you don’t need to say it as “seventeen seventy six, seventh month, fourth day”. You can say “July 4th, 1776” or “The 4th of July, 1776”.
I don’t really care which way it goes, it just gets confusing if both month and date are 12 or lower and the format wasn’t specified ahead of time
Yeah. Had issues getting ID when I first came to US. They mixed up my date of birth, and I needed to go get it corrected. I didn’t even notice it until I almost missed a flight trying to use that ID, which didn’t match with their system. Fortunately I also had my passport with me.
Because they’re teenagers. In the real world nobody actually gives a fuck. Call me weird, but the different formats have never caused me a single instant of confusion in my entire life.
As an American immigrant in Germany, I encounter it somewhat regularly and it still doesn’t matter.
It was a bit of a problem when they thought I forged my covid vaccination card, because I got a shot on January tenth or something. I would then explain that I’m American and we do that. 80% of the time, they had no more questions, 20% of the time I’d show my drivers license birthday for proof (luckily I was born after the 12th).
The things that are actually problematic are the unknown tools used for my dental work (my implant screw is going to need to get a custom screwdriver made for it), and understanding temperature at an intuitive level. I understand the common weather numbers, but do I want coffee that’s 55 degrees or 70 degrees? No idea until I convert. Luckily, it’s the easiest conversion to do.
Not once on my life have i known what temperature my coffee is or should be.
You must do a lot of business with overseas people. It causes confusion pretty often
Nope. Never. Every time people are easily able to figure it out in a matter of seconds.
In the grand scale of things it’s probably one of the least important things I can think of.
One word: Ambiguity. We need to either have a standard and stick to it, or a small handful of standards that cannot be confused for each other. DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY can be confused for each other, so the nonsensical MM/DD/YYYY should move over and make room for DD/MM/YYYY, or we should drop both and just use YYYY-MM-DD.
Or DD-MMM-YYYY. Like 05/OCT/2005, which is my favorite if I don’t need it to be entirely numerical.
The best date format is ISO 8601 anyways.
It’s not about saying it. It has to do with ordering it by size of time unit. Like I don’t write the time as 43:12:19 to denote 43 minutes and 19 seconds past midday do I.
Not necessarily. Size of time unit doesn’t explicitly mean largest to smallest. For human comprehension day first makes sense because that’s the most significant piece of data usually. Likewise for time of day the hour is the most significant piece of data.
Though for computer comprehension, absolutely yyyy/mm/dd is best hands down.
ISO8601 is the best format and the international standard to denote date and time.
2023-11-21T00:34:2
People don’t get upset about saying the date in whatever format. They get upset when you write it in that format without specifying, so that you don’t know if 07/04/1776 is July 4th or April 7th.
I love it when someone sends me a message like this:
Hey there! What are you doing on 4/5?
???
What’s especially bad is things that are meant for an international audience. Like the 2023 Miami Formula 1 race was held the weekend of the 5th to the 7th of May. But, say you didn’t know that and you see that the date is specified as: 05/07/2023. Is that a race in May or July? It’s Formula 1 so the audience is probably mostly European so the European order makes sense. But, it’s a race in the USA so the US order makes sense.
It really sucks when to decode a date and time you have to first figure out who the target audience for the information is, then use that to help decode the information.
