> Other than that people from Europe seem to think all of their practices are better than others, what is the possible reasoning that the order of numbers in a date string could have a right and wrong solution?

The argument is that ordering the numbers based on the size of units makes things easier and more useful. Both DD-MM-YYYY and YYYY-MM-DD follow this pattern, and both have their advantages/disadvantages. The latter is especially useful due to alphanumerical sorting.

> ordering the numbers based on the size of units makes things easier and more useful

How does it make it easier and more useful?

Big endian ordering reduces sorting by date to sorting by number. But not big endian parts in little endian order.

Apart from sorting advantages it makes the format less confusing, since it's just about remembering ascending/descending vs. three individual positions. If I see a DD-MM-YYYY date or YYYY-MM-DD I know which one it has to be. If I see MM-DD-YYYY I have to be told, or I will misunderstand as long as the date is ambiguous.

Thank you for this comment and many others in this thread. I feel I've been converted to the YYYY-MM-DD structure. Because it's in order of specificity. It feels like it saves time and potentially compute.

However, I think a big problem with this is the way people say dates colloquially. Such as, March 24th 2019. Or even the 24th of March, 2019.

I can't imagine saying to someone, oh can you come over to my party, it's 2024 September 5th.

In many ways digital is designed to be a facsimile of analog. So sometimes what "makes sense" to people hyper fixated on the topic are simply not amenable to real society.

So that's where DD-MM-YYYY comes in. In my language people always say dates in that order, and even when taking English I'll refer to "the 24th of March 2019". YYYY-MM-DD is, strangely enough, kind of just "a bunch of numbers" to me. If someone tells me a date in that format it'll take a second to realise it's a date. But for digital storage it's highly useful! I'm fine switching between the two formats based on the situation. The length of the year specifier makes this unambiguous.

There is no correct answer. Having the segments go from smallest to largest or vice versa seems more logical than mid-small-large, but frankly iso8601 is clearly the most logical we have, but we’re never going to get everyone to use that outside of computer programming contexts.

Lexical sort ordering without parsing the date string is a great property.

But clearly in human terms it’s never going to be a solved issue! Nobody is looking for a solution, and everyone likes their own convention. Mutual understanding is what’s important.

The fact we have divergent date string formats is most frustrating because for many dates (up to the 12 of every month) it is ambiguous which format is in play.

It's not a matter of 1password deciding which format is "correct". They just need to actually respect the user's locale settings.

I agree, I was replying to the prior comment. Non-locale respecting dates are always problematic for users.

> Lexical sort ordering without parsing the date string is a great property.

Why? Why is the date even a string in the first place? It ought to be internally represented as 3 numbers. Or a Unix timestamp. Convert it to months, days, and/or years as appropriate right before printing.

Never use unix time stamp as date. You don’t know time zone, you need to calculate leap years (both days and seconds), summer time etc such a “date” would immediately morph into useless random number

The argument is that writing the parts in a consistently increasing or decreasing precision order makes more sense.

So these are good.

- year / month / day

- day / month / year

And this is bad.

- month / day / year

Outside the US, how is a month+day combination written out/spoken?

"May 3" / "May 3rd" or "3 May" ?

3 May in Italy. It’s always day first. You never hear anything saying or writing the month first.

In most contexts I would never use the cardinal number "3", it'd always be "the 3rd of May" or "May (the) 3rd", but in a country like Australia (with a high number of speakers from different cultural backgrounds) you hear all sorts of conventions used in casual conversation.

"3 May" in French (« le trois mai »)

“3rd of may”

While I am a strong supporter of ISO8601 (e.g. 2023-07-12) there is an argument that decreasing specificity is preferable (as in ISO8601) and that for most day-to-day usage the year is somewhat implicit, hence being at the end.

Personally, I write the month out if I'm not using 8601 formatting to avoid any ambiguity.

For any sort of recordkeeping, though, I think it's preferable to go full on YYYY-MM-DD. It's more thorough, precise, and sorts properly on a computer.

I don't think "it makes more sense" is exactly describing the reasoning.

Neither do I, but the rest of what I wrote does.

Doing a bunch of slashes like this is ambiguous. But the footgun that really worries me is the international divide over whether a decimal separator should be a comma or period. 10,000.00 or 10.000,00 [1] ! Which hasn't footguned me yet, but I'm just waiting for someone to complain about a 100x unexpected financial impact of whatever they bought, because it was only supposed to be 10.00 not 10,000. Yes, I know there's an extra zero there to rescue, but still.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_separator

Tech debt, a bunch of fundamental code that is hardcoded to process dates in the one format and would completely break everything if you passed it a date formatted otherwise. Dates are hard.

If for some reason you had to handle dates as strings everywhere and parse them yourself, then sure. But you should be able to pass and store Date objects or Unix timestamps internally, and then call established helpers to display them.

1Password 8 was a new code base.

Probably the fact that the US is the only country in the world that puts them the wrong way around.

I don't know why you're down voted.

Mm/DD/yyyy is a crazy format.

If it weren't for the fact that my month number and day number were the same, I don't think I ever would have gotten it right growing up

> Mm/DD/yyyy is a crazy format.

Why?

It's middle endian.

Imagine having middle endian values in a processor. You're reading "1,337" as 3317.

It's nonsensical.

Big-endian yyyy-mm-dd is the most rationally consistent since it's how we write numbers normally. 1,337 is big endian: the 1 is the most significant (biggest) number, etc.