Came here to complain specifically about this. 2022-02-22 is unambiguous, big endian, and sorts nicely. IDK why society still uses any other date formats considering how international everything is.

It's because people for hundreds of years have been saying "March second, nineteen sixty two" which they then write out in that order. As a programmer, peoples' frustrations are understandable, but you're a bit naïve if you think even a percentage point of the speaking population of the world knows or is concerned with big endian-ness or sortability. However they speak English, at least in America, in that order, and that's the way they write it. Europeans only got it a little better.

I'm an Australian who occasionally has video chats with Americans overseas for work and regularly plays D&D online at least once a week with friends all over the world.

The only time I've every heard someone say "<Month> <Ordinal>" or "<Month> the <Ordinal>" is when talking with Americans.

Every other time it's always "<Ordinal> of <Month>" or just "<Ordinal>" for short.

> Europeans only got it a little better.

There is a reasonable argument for little endian dates (as in the least significant information is usually the most relevant as it changes most often), but apart from the "it has been like this forever" I don't see any reasonable argument for middle endian date formats. Then again, the US is notoriously resistant to the metric system too.

So, European in the US, here. I switch my dates stubbornly to DD-MM-YYYY, 'cause that's the only way. Of course I would. But then there's so many US applications that don't adhere to my settings and use MM-DD-YYYY. So then I am still deciphering 05-07-2020-kind of stuff. All. The. Freakin'. Time.

:)

I sometimes format dates in documents or emails dd-MMM-yyyy when the audience is international. ie 2-Feb-2022 using the short month form disambiguates the fields and I think avoids mental gymnastics like 'what month is 09 again?' for the reader. (or in my case the finger-counting....)

I frequently receive date data in Excel spreadsheets from the UK, but as a US user of Excel, I cannot convince it to interpret the date correctly. It is astonishingly bad at this.

European date format doesn’t make sense either. It still doesn’t sort and the little-endian date is composed of big-endian year, month, and day.

Putting the day first isn’t actually a benefit because you still need the year and month for context.

Any favoritism of the EU format is the same as the US format. Just familiarity.

ISO8601 is the only way.

I agree that the European format is probably not more useful, and you probably convinced me to go change my settings to YYYY-MM-DD. But I _do_ think that the European format makes more _sense_, it being in chronological "magnitude" order.

I can understand that perspective, although I maintain the usage is only preferred because of familiarity.

Since you are already on the fence with ISO8601 I invite you to consider time of day. Would you use second:minute:hour? That is also in (reverse!) “chronological magnitude” order.

It's because it matches the way we speak dates aloud. When intended for human consumption, sortability and big-endianness doesn't matter, but matching the way we speak does. Maybe other cultures actually speak dates differently, I don't know, but I have never seen a native English speaker habitually speak dates any differently than "January 1st, 2001".

All that said, I definitely agree with the original complaint, m-dd-yy is an atrocious format. If you're going to use dashes, stick with yyyy-mm-dd. Replacing the dashes with slashes, as in 2/22/22, would have been fine.

In the UK I think "1st of January" is probably slightly more common than "January the 1st" although you hear both. "January 1st" (no "the") sounds American.

Given that so many (all?) other English speaking nations including the UK usually speak it the other way around and write it day-month-year, I wonder if writing (especially thinking about newspapers here) influenced the way you speak it and not the other way around. March 1st saves space and ink over 1st of March or some other rationale. Someone certainly has already investigated the origin of putting the month first?

Edit: [1] says my hypothesis is most likely wrong, but that the UK just changed it later to match the rest of Europe. So maybe that influenced their way of speaking? In any case, matching the way one speaks doesn't seem to be a strong reason as it's easily adaptable and month names are unambiguous. Interestingly it also quotes that using a purely numeric format is incorrect in any formal use as to not confuse month and day.

[1] https://iso.mit.edu/americanisms/date-format-in-the-united-s...

Old documents from the UK use both formats. There could be a European influence, but it would be from 150 or more years ago.

http://anguline.co.uk/cert/birth.html

“the twenty-sixth of April” would be the way I say today’s date and anecdotally is in common usage in both countries I’ve lived in (the UK and Australia, both using d/m/y). I’d say it’s about as frequent as “April the twenty-sixth” by itself, and definitely more common if you include the day (“Tuesday, the twenty-sixth of April”).

Oh this is a great point! I'd never realized that. I know that in Spanish (and I assume many of the romance languages) we always say the day first, eg dos de febrero (2nd of February). In American English even though the day first technically is grammatically correct, we pretty much never say it in that order (February 2nd instead of the 2nd of February)

I'm from NZ and it is 100% normal to switch back and forth between "The second of March" and "March the 23rd".

People I have met from Australia, South Africa, the UK, all have the same flexibility.

I don't think how we speak dates is relevant. We say "hundred and fifty dollars" but still write it as "$150".

Your error is expecting reasonableness. All linguistic conventions are either arbitrary or lost to time, and mostly only exist for tradition's sake.

I can’t wrap my head around a little endian date.

If you want to write the date little endian then you should do the same with the year. So today’s little-endian date is 26-04-2220. Or maybe that is 62-40-2220? Or is it 62-40-2202?

ISO8601 is the only sane date format. Anything else is only favored for familiarity.

We do say "five dollars" while writing "$5", so saying and writing different things is not unheard of.

And endiannes / sorting comes up in real life pretty often - scanning for large numbers in the price list, or finding stuff in the sorts list.

I think if history turned differently, we could have had sane time format in the US.

Have they not been doing the same with "fourth of July"? Or is this an exception?

Our Independence Day is probably a special case. Clearly language is flexible enough to say all the formats, but the date format we write matches the most common verbalization.

> people for hundreds of years have been saying "March second, nineteen sixty two"

In many other English-speaking countries people usually say "the second of March, nineteen sixty two."

Ides of March vs March Ides....

twelve thirty or half twelve

color or colour

Pretty funny America's most patriotic day is an edge case for something culturally American

I write it in that order some of the time… But when I do, I spell out the month because when I say “I was born on June 14th, 1962,” I don’t say I was born on 6/14/62. I also never say 14/6/62. In fact, I almost never say a month’s number in conversation.

If you want to write it out the way it’s spoken, write it out the way its spoken. Mixing the computer’s numbers and the spoken word’s grammar make for misunderstandings, and as a programmer, eliminating misunderstandings is one of my goals.

plus plus to pragmatic - I have settled on 02feb2022 to write, and I do. Occassionally that finds its way into computer programs around here.

Same, but with spaces, and the month always full capitalized. I learned this habit in the Military as an alternative to 20220222. 22 FEB 2022 is nice because it's neither a string of numbers, which is very intimidating to read if it's written out to include hours minutes and seconds, like 20220222122222. It also completely bypasses the argument around month and day because the format includes spelling specific to the month.

If I'm writing a letter or addressing a specific thing in a formal context I chose to "revert" to the Month, Day Year because it's the social standard for the country I am in, and I want to fit into that cultural expectation, but if it's for a business document or normal chatter I think DD MMM YYYY is probably the clearest to both English & Non-English speakers. It eliminates the distractions I'd normally be dealing with when considering if I'm talking to someone out of country or not. It would be really great if it ends up being more widely adopted.

The one exception I can think of is a bug in the mssql datetime type (but not date or datetime2) where strings in that format are assumed to be yyyy-dd-mm if the locale dateformat is dmy (e.g. British English).

ISO 8601 is IMO the only sane format.

I expected the top comment on hackernews to be something this pedantic and irrelevant to the content, and I was not disappointed

I had to read the parent comment twice to understand that it was talking about the date in the title of the post and not anything relevant whatsoever.

I mean, there is literally no way to confuse it with another date, unless you go back 100 years, when Slack didn't exist.

There is no 22nd month, so we know the 22s are the day and the year, leaving only the 2 to be the month. Is it really that difficult to parse?

I'm so tired of having to do that game every time I see a date. It is not hard, but it is quite annoying. Especially since it isn't solvable in a lot of cases, so you try to reason your way to the most realistic interpretation.

It shouldn't be this hard.

It’s not really that hard. Like the imperial system, Americans just memorize how it works as children and don’t think about it anymore.

Think about it like speaking a different language, except with numbers and not words.

The complaint isn't about the particular other order, but the fact that the order is ambiguous. In this case that doesn't matter, but often it does.

Americans memorize inches and yards, and often also memorize centimeters and meters, and working with either is fine, but we're not so often faced with numbers where it might be inches or centimeters and we have to figure out which (and when we are, it's sometimes a pain - certainly a bigger pain that working with known units).

Or, working with your language analogy, please go fetch me some "pasta" without knowing whether I'm speaking Italian or Polish.

I instinctively felt that the ambiguity ought to not truly exist, but I wanted to find some backing. According to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

… all the major predominantly English speaking counties will use mostly hyphens in the dd-mm-yyyy format. So although there is ambiguity, it’s easily resolved by picking that as the default mentally and only back tracking on failure.

Now in the more general case, this whole thing feels like a lieutenant/leftenant situation. We are annoyed simply because it’s not they way that we do things in a peculiar case, when otherwise the language is fully intelligible.

> … all the major predominantly English speaking counties will use mostly hyphens in the dd-mm-yyyy format.

Yes, which makes reasonable the complaint about mm-dd-yyy.

> So although there is ambiguity, it’s easily resolved by picking that as the default mentally and only back tracking on failure.

This is both more work and also error prone in the general case (although it works out fine in this case).

> Now in the more general case, this whole thing feels like a lieutenant/leftenant situation.

Not at all. Whether I read "lieutenant" or "leftenant", I know what you're talking about. If I read 2-10-23, I might miss your birthday party.

Even people in non-English-speaking countries write in English all the time, especially on the Internet.

Picking one default and back-tracking on failure really isn't that comforting nor the constant reminder that the date you thought it was might be something else.

Context matters in your pasta scenario.

Context also matters in the date parsing scenario. 11/12/22 could be several different dates depending on the context.

Yeah, and in this post, it's clear what it is.

It may not have happened to you yet, but someday you'll see a date somewhere other than this post.

This honestly has me laughing.

Since the text itself doesn't clarify, context is the only way of resolving any of the scenarios. In each case it's usually sufficient and often not all that hard. But it's always harder than if the system in use was made explicit, and I understand the complaint (even if my annoyance at the ambiguity is quite significantly below the level where I would have complained myself, particularly in this case).

> Think about it like speaking a different language

The correct analogy is I don't know which language is spoken and the same words get used in multiple languages with different meaning. Now I can apply heuristics to figure it out or in some cases I can only guess.

That particular date is possible to understand, but the date format is not. (Is is really that fun to try to figure out what 12-11-21 means ?)

Is there a different post where they used this date format?

None of their other incident reports even have a date in the title. Yet this one does, and in a weird format. Maybe there's something novel about the date, and it's written this was to emphasize the novelty, not to provide some vital information that happens to be excluded on every other incident report title they've posted.

November 21, 1812

What do I win?

So we could either:

a) Use a far superior date format which nearly the entire world uses by default and is better and simpler in many ways.

b) Do logic when we see dates to try workout what format the date is in.

Going with a seems like a no brainer...

Especially in this scenario where you are communicating to an international audience.

> leaving only the 2 to be the day

I think you meant "to be the month" there. qed■

Beautiful.

Yeah, but what about that party that I threw on 10/11/12. Did I set it for November 12, 2010, or October 11 in 2012? Or somewhen else?

It's a waste of effort and makes me wonder about the competence of the person who wrote it (when looking at a mangled date generally). Display dates are for humans so write the month name, then it doesn't matter what the order is.

22 Feb 22

Feb 22 22 (weird but still better)

22 22 Feb (very weird but still better)

This also goes to show that 2022 is a better choice. My own personal preference - the 22nd of February 2022.

I just thought it was a typo.

It's a quirky nod to the fact that all the digits were 2 on that day in this format.

OMG - I thought I clicked on the tablet thread regarding Sumerian OOOs -- and I thought you were sarcastically making fun of the way the Sumerians captured dates on limestone tablets ~4,000 years ago...

(i had scrolled immediately down, so the thread titel wasnt visible when I was reading your comment)

haha

This is what you sometimes see for best-before dates in Canada. Even better, because our dates are “supposed to” be like 22/2 but I don’t think anyone here does that, except Quebec perhaps. Sometimes you just have no clue

The point is to describe the date using only the number 2.

I know it's somewhat trivial but it does bother me a bit too, because I am used to the dashes being an indicator that ISO 8601 is being used. If you're going to use a nonstandard format, I'd much prefer it not look like a standard one.

This. The use of dashes here is a bit annoying IMO ...

Not sure if this is standard but I usually see the delimiter being used to define the date format: big-endian y-m-d uses dashes, middle-endian m/d/y uses slashes, and d.m.y little-endian uses dots.

> Not sure if this is standard but I usually see the delimiter being used to define the date format:

No. Pretty much every separator / order combination is in regular use.

See the table under “Listing” at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

The incident was caused by a database query that was "2-22-22" when it was supposed to be "2-22-22".

It's a shortened version of "February 22, 2022"

It doesn't seem that bad to turn it into 2-22-22.

The issue is a great deal of the rest of the world don't do this, so you need to decide whether to apply best-guess heuristics to parse it or decide that it's a typo ("ah there's not 22 months, so maybe it's the 22nd of February or someone fat-fingered the 2nd of February...?").

In this case you can lookup Slack outages to disambiguate it, but the frustration here - and I share it - is directed at the stubborn refusal to use a standard format that the reest of the world has agreed upon.

It's also a shortened version of "22nd of February, 2022".

> Am I missing something?

Yes, the numbers are all the same, and the author is based in the US, and thus is using the default format in the US. So odd that this is the top comment.