Another great thing about 2021-03-11 is that, even putting aside its technical advantages, it is (probably) intuitively understandable to any literate person even if they have never seen it before and, most importantly, it is almost immune from confusion because (hopefully) nobody is insane enough to expect YYYY-DD-MM. YYYY-MM-DD both satisfies the American intuitive expectation of month coming before day, and the Worldwide expectation of time units being displayed in a logical order.

Another great thing about 2021-03-11 is that it ascii sorts correctly.

This is the big one when it comes to sorting files and directories on disk. It makes sorting and finding what you look for so much easier.

Non-scientifically, about 20% of people won't: https://twitter.com/troyhunt/status/978747364105011202

I don't think it's fair to assume that the people choosing the WTF option would not have interpreted the format correctly if they had to pick an actual interpretation.

I have seen non-Americans write YYYY/DD/MM before. Hyphens are key here.

That is horrifying.

I am glad I have never met these people.

yyyy.dd.mm. (but not with hyphens!) are commonly used for all the languages where their grammar and word order means that the spoken way to say dates is like "twothousandtwentieth year's first march".

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> it is almost immune from confusion because (hopefully) nobody is insane enough to expect YYYY-DD-MM. YYYY-MM-DD both satisfies the American intuitive expectation of month coming before day,

I disagree. (Or, perhaps I’m insane...) I paused when coming across the ANSI version in the article as I couldn’t tell whether it was YYYY-MM-DD or YYYY-DD-MM. I thought there was a typo or something.

I’ve nothing against the standard, but as Americans have no ‘intuitive’ reason to sort the fields by significance, it is natural for some to incorrectly assume the ANSI version is just the American version written backwards.

I also always write 11 मार्च 2021 or similar whenever possible. No problems so far.

I go with 「２０２１年０３月１１日」. Free bonus test included for whether software handles alternate numerals ;)

Tangent, but I do like the space-efficiency in some cases for Chinese/Japanese characters that make them great for status bars and terminal prompts.

E.g. a single character to unambiguously denote weekday, window layout (全／広／高）, and others. Renders everywhere as long as you have a decent CJK font. Bonus: looks a lot less stupid than emojis.

My desktop terminal prompt right now shows [金 19:58:22] - just a single character and as long as it's < 7d ago it's unambiguous what time and day a command exited in case I forget.

> My desktop terminal prompt right now shows [金 19:58:22] - just a single character and as long as it's < 7d ago it's unambiguous what time and day a command exited in case I forget.

You're a bit cheating there :) It's one character that takes up 2 columns.

You could get away with using the first 2 characters from the English names as they are unique. But I know that in English that's unusual but for example in German, the 2 letter abbreviation are the standard ones.

You say weekday, but Google translate and Wikipedia say that 金 means gold?

金 from 金曜日 (Kinyōbi) means Friday. The letter correspond to the planet the weekday was named after, just like in English (金星 is Venus)

The planet-weekday combination is harder to see in English than e.g. in Romance languages like French because English derived its planet names from Roman gods, but its weekday names from Norse gods (e.g. Friday comes from Freya). German is similar, having Freitag for Friday (again from Freya) and Donnerstag for Thursday (from Thor).

Slightly off, but this is fun, so let me expand (along with a minor correction):

The days of the week were named after the seven classical planets of astrology (by the Romans, who in turn named the seven classical planets, and hence the days, after Roman deities).

The names were taken up by speakers of Germanic languages, and eventually underwent semantic loan translation: Germanic deities were substituted for the Roman ones (with the exception of Saturday). Some people say that the Germanic deities themselves were culturally identified as one and the same as the Roman deities, but we probably won't ever know for sure (interpretatio germanica, analogously to the interpretatio graeca, the identification of Egyptian, Roman and Greek deities [1]).

And now, a minor correction: The day of Venus, Friday bears the name of the Germanic goddess Frigg, who is not the same as the Norse goddess Freyja. The meeting of the two characters, in a debate against Loki, is described in the Poetic Edda [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpretatio_germanica [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokasenna

Maybe a bit cheating - but it's nice with the consistency, and visually it becomes a lot more clear and immediate at least for me.

"金" would be short for "金曜日", a common way to abbreviate weekday names in calendars etc and yes, Friday is indeed the day of gold - I like to imagine it's the old pay day for workers maybe? :D

Absolutely agree. Also in some cases you get "tables" aligned for free (... if there's nothing else length-varying.)