• merc@sh.itjust.works
      45·
      6 days ago

      As for why it’s better:

      1. It’s in sort order. Even if you use it for things that don’t understand dates, they sort properly because the day is the last part, month is the middle part, and year is the first part. If you include hours, minutes or seconds, the sort order is still preserved.
      2. Speaking of things that don’t understand dates, because there are no slashes, you can easily use it in file names, directories, and anything else that treats slash as a special character. In addition, if you include the time part, because it uses “T” to separate the date and time, it doesn’t use a space, so once again it can be easily used anywhere where a space might cause issues.
      • raspberriesareyummy@lemmy.world
        4·
        6 days ago

        To be fair, the time separators don’t behave well on all implementations of filesystem access by filename. Need to use underscores or omit them at times.

    • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      4·
      6 days ago

      Except I can’t get behind the time part of it, personally. I can see the point of doing GMT with the offset if you’re working across multiple timezones, but it’s overkill for situations where you aren’t.

        • wizardbeard@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
          2·
          6 days ago

          If you work at a company where all of its offices are in the same time zone and you’re time-stamping logs, then it’s more expedient for understanding and placing an event in time against other things to use local time.

          Unless everything is already standardized as GMT with offset I guess, but I feel like down that route lies madness.

          “I got your email at 20:37:45-7:00” is a few more steps than “I got your email at 1:37PM”.

          It’s not a big hurdle, but I try to design for the newest member on the team scrambling in panic rather than a calm cool professional already familiar with conventions.

          Now, as soon as we do start dealing with multiple time zones I would just cut my custom time formatting string down to the shorthand to have the scripting language output in the full ISO 8601 format. But until then, being able to easily sort the the date properly and having the time be more human readable is a more “workable” compromise.

    • BigDiction@lemmy.world
      811·
      6 days ago

      It’s great, and standard for software. But do any of y’all communicate dates like this in your personal life?

      Like “want to go to a hockey game with me 2026-10-17?” As cursed as mm-dd-yy is, it feels a lot more natural in conversation.

        • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.caEnglish
          1·
          6 days ago

          same. even if they give a different format, because fuck that I’m not thinking about what arbitrary format you want me to use, I see a date field and I’m filling it out with the proper date format

      • Laurel Raven@lemmy.blahaj.zone
        5·
        6 days ago

        Yes, kind of.

        I shorthand it verbally unless I’m giving a full date, but typed, it’s almost always yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss (whichever part of that is relevant).

        I do this because I believe it’s the most logical, it sorts properly without having to use a datetime library, and it can’t be confused with another system (is 12-1-2026 in the future or the past? No way to know just by looking at it).

        Just shortening it to MM-dd could cause confusion with anyone not in the US so I’ll typically include the year as well (also useful if I wind up having to look at old notes or emails to not have to figure out the year I meant … Which has happened more than once …)

      • lividweasel@lemmy.world
        3·
        6 days ago

        Only a truly insane person would use mm-dd-yy in conversation. “Want to go to a hockey game with me ten seventeen twenty-six?” Or worse, “…oh four oh seven twenty-seven.” Pure madness.

        Conversationally, mmm d yy or d mmm yy (usually just shortened to mmm d or d mmm) is where it’s at.

      • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.caEnglish
        1·
        6 days ago

        yes, I’ll send dates as mm-dd in my personal life as well. only when discussing exact dates for scheduling things, otherwise in conversational messaging it’s mmmm dd

        like if we’re talking about when we want to go do x activity, I’ll propose August 8th. but if we’re scheduling trip dates, it’s 08-08 through 09-12

  • gex@lemmy.world
    511·
    6 days ago

    yyyy/mm/dd, it’s less ambiguous and it sorts nicely

    Edit: so many replies suggesting using a hyphen as a separator, I’d like to compromise by using the oblique angle sign (⦧) which looks like a slash that becomes a hyphen in the middle. yyyy⦧mm⦧dd

  • Xyphius@lemmy.ca
    21·
    6 days ago

    I feel like DD/MM/YYYY is the same as doing: ss:mm:HH and I find that confusing.

    • ParadoxSeahorse@lemmy.world
      95·
      6 days ago

      That’s really funny. DMY is more like Hms in that it is in descending order of relevance. Most people asking the date or time are looking for the hour of the day or the day of the month, and the rest is context.

      • Mavenbushlog@lemmy.worlddeleted by creator
        6·
        6 days ago

        Files get sorted by alphanumerical order so ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) is objectively superior in that regard.

        • ParadoxSeahorse@lemmy.world
          2·
          6 days ago

          My comment was about vocal human interaction, not on a device.

          I agree with that in principle, but a) it should be in meta data and b) it should be abstracted so the user can display any format they wish. As a last resort, in the file name, sure. That standard adds a lot of extra time gumpf

    • kamen@lemmy.world
      2·
      6 days ago

      I see the duality in this but I still think both are valid. When telling the time, there’s usually no point in including the seconds since they’ll have changed before you finish saying the whole thing anyway. In spoken word IMO it makes sense to go from more specific to less specific, and even not include extra parts sometimes (e. g. “today is the 3rd” when it’s expected to know the month and, well, year from context, or “it’s half past” to someone whom you’ve told the time a couple of minutes ago).

    • Axolotl@feddit.it
      1·
      5 days ago

      The point is the order of importance, i am gonna need to know day and month we are in way more often than the year, i also want to know more often the hours and the minutes than the seconds, the seconds change way too often to be useful in most scenarios

  • GlendatheGayWitch@lemmy.world
    62·
    4 days ago

    Why? dd/mm/yyyy isnt practical. If you are asking someone to check out part of a book, you wouldn’t say “paragraph 4, chapter 3”, you start broad and become more specific. Calendars, at least in the US, are organized by month. You have turn turn to the month page before finding the date, it makes more sense to say month first because its the first piece of information that you need (unless its a more rare case that you are talking about an event in another year).

    Im sure programmers prefer something different, but humans shouldn’t have to communicate differently to make computing easier. Computing exists to make human life easier, not the other way around.

    • Domitian@lemmy.world
      71·
      4 days ago

      mm/dd/yyyy is horrendous and inconsistent, you can argue that yyyy/mm/dd is correct, but for daily use dd/mm/yyyy is way better

      • Jyek@sh.itjust.works
        2·
        4 days ago

        What is inconsistent about it? That’s a weird argument against its use.

        I like it because it’s in order of smallest maximum integer. I know that’s not why we use it in the US but it’s still satisfying to me to see the first number smaller than the second on all but 78 days of the year.

      • JimVanDeventer@lemmy.world
        1·
        4 days ago

        For daily use — like, if someone asks me the date — I don’t normally bother telling them the year anyway (nor the month, for that matter). But for situations wherein the year is important enough to mention, year/month/day all the way.

  • FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca
    2·
    4 days ago

    Month first is better because when someone says the date aloud, they start with the month “August 5th, 2026”

    • PolarKraken@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      AKA typically the single most relevant reason to record one at all. But yes. Most people prefer to begin by thinking about the least significant piece of information, and then go from there.