today is 202309sep21
because i use it for filenames, i don't put in extra punctuation, there are enough cues in the format as is. To really see it, imagine scanning a list of files with different dates
it will still collate properly mixed with languages other than english
202304abr22 - My Spanish appointment
202304apr15 - My English appointment
202304avr07 - My French appointment 20230915sepFRI
2023.09.15.sep.fri
2023.09.05.rab.sep.fri
2023.09.05.3watrab.sep.3fri
1023 (1000, 100, 10, 1)
123.456 (100, …, 0.001)
To save screen space I often use decimals in file names:
2023.05.23 Design SummaryAn interesting point is that the NHS has to deal with many languages and people that don't have English as a first language. That's another reason for being very explicit.
Only YYYY/MM/DD HH24:MI:SS makes sense. Choose your sepators.
Hand-written accounting journals, day books, have date ordering built into their physical substrate. It didn't matter how dates were given orally (some places: "today is the 23rd of June 1844"; others: "it's June 23, 1844 today"); nor did it matter that this ordering was transcribed onto the paper, using month numbers rather than the names of the months.
Now we do need to sort dates, so let's turn Japanese.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Japa...
YYYY/MM/DD HH:MM:SS has its place as well, but not here.
No, because the seconds are rarely important.
>How do you write the year? Do you put decade before century?
No, because that's not how numbers work.
>How do you write numbers? Do you put the ones place before the tens?
Same answer.
>Toddmorey asked why units don’t go from small to large and I explained that it is inconsistent with how we write numbers.
Dates aren't numbers. There is a lot more context and meaning around dates that we need to consider when we verbalise and write them. But, for the purposes of e.g. data storage then absolutely - we can consider them no different from numbers. You have to understand that isn't the case with conversational English, though.
Yes, conversational english is arbitrary. The preference there is the familiar so the listener understands. But both commonly used date formats (MM/DD/YYYY HH:MI:SS and DD/MM/YYYY HH:MI:SS) are inconsistent and arbitrary. You can’t say your preference makes more sense than the other because that’s just a matter of personal familiarity.
If you need sorting, use a tool that understands dates, simple as that. Many tools do, just some common businesss microsoft tools don't.
Humans think day/month or month/day, they have absolutely no interest in reading the year first.
None of this helps with organizing photo libraries, legal documents and video archives.
/s but maybe not…
When we're saying a date out loud, we Americans tend to say, "September 21st, 2023," whereas I've noticed many of the Brits I've worked with have tended to say, "21st September, 2023," sometimes with an "of" after the day. Those spoken word orders were carried over into the written form, is my suspicion.
If the the month was unclear you might reply with "21st of what?" but you'd never expect an answer of just "September" to the question "What's the date?".
My assumption was it's due to an attempt to make the written date format closer to the HH:MM, and they just forgot about the years, with the spoken "Month, DayOfMonth" coming later.
Do people in the US generally say "the 4th of July" or "July, 4th" more? That might hint at an origin.
As for why the month comes first, I get the feeling we Americans care about precision up to a month and less so about the numerical day such as "When does school start?" with an answer of "School starts in September". Obviously people need the precise date if you actually have a student going, but in a lot of conversation, people are just looking for the month. I can imagine that being even more true in earlier times.
We also peg things to months such as our elections being the second Tuesday of November or Labor Day being the first Monday of September. Note that in those phrases we are putting the day kind of first, but not in a particular numerical way. The month is what sticks out as a rough guesstimate of the time period.
(Teasing. I’ve always thought the US MM/DD/YYYY format makes absolutely no sense. Why don’t the units go small, bigger, biggest? Why do we continue to put up with that?)