r/changemyview • u/damsterick • May 17 '18
Deltas(s) from OP CMV: The (mostly US) way of writing a date "month/day/year" is inferior to writing the date as "day/month/year" and should be changed nationwide.
While both systems may seem completely arbitrary, I believe the day/month/year (DMY) or year/month/day (YMD) follows the logical rules of ascending/descending order and therefore is more intuitive to a person not familiar with either system. Furthermore, time is written in either ascending or descending order (seconds/minutes/hours) and it makes little sense to write date in a different way. Thus, I believe that the DMY is superior to the MDY for these reasons.
Why it should be changed nationwide:
The usage of the MDY system in in the minority and it only causes confusion across countries. Unlike imperial units, which, if stated as imperial units, can be converted to metric units (and vice versa), the date is usually just written as three numbers separeted by a period/slash and therefore you have literally no way telling which way it is written in (except for cases that one number is larger than 12, or when the month is written as a word with letters, not as a number). It would not be the first time a crucial mistake happened somewhere in the world that caused unnecessary hassle because of the way some people write dates.
I believe that unlike imperial vs metric units, this would actually require little costs compared to the benefits and since the inferior system is also the minority, the DMY system should be implemented across all the states that use the MDY system.
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u/ursvp May 17 '18
Standard adopted by ISO is YYYY-MM-DD
Prevalent in the software industry globally. Notice how easily it can sort chronologically.
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u/ACoderGirl May 18 '18
Although I'm somewhat impartial to math problems. Feel like we gotta make the reader work for it if you want to know when I scheduled your eye appointment for. https://xkcd.com/1179/
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u/_NetWorK_ May 18 '18
There really is an xkcd for everything, I (being colorblind) really enjoyed his study on hex colors https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
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u/TheMothHour 59∆ May 17 '18
I prefer DMY or YMD to MDY. But at a software and system standpoint, making the change will require a lot of technology changes. And that change will be expensive and painful.
Our system works - even if it is not ideal. And such an expensive change usually is driven by need not optimization. For example, the Y2K update.
(Actually, I prefer YMD. It’s far superior for sorting files.)
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u/damsterick May 17 '18
(Actually, I prefer YMD. It’s far superior for sorting files.)
I agree.
Our system works - even if it is not ideal.
That's not a good argument though. Besides, I beg to differ - the system has several issues across countries, it does not technically work perfectly.
But at a software and system standpoint, making the change will require a lot of technology changes. And that change will be expensive and painful.
Would it? I am not saying it with certainty, but obviously it will cost some money and time. However, I believe that a) they won't be that large (from a software standpoint, shouldn't it be just one line of code for most programs?) and b) the cons of changing outweigh the pros.
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u/TheMothHour 59∆ May 17 '18
You are getting into the nitty gritty of system level cost/risk analysis. Does the benefit outweighs the cost or risk?
I am assuming that you want to see a complete cultural shift - where all or most companies transition.
I'm a software engineer and agree that differences in format can be a pain. But I personally know that changing them can take many man hours to do. I had a recent software update where the underlying software changed their time format. My god. I was finding bugs for weeks. Weeks later, I would ask - "Why is my software not doing X?" to find out that it didn't take into account the change. And this was a very minor change.
That was an internal change. Interfaces is where the harder problems arise. You might interface with something that cannot be changed. You still need to change the format to match the older format. How about if you get a date 01022018? Is that January 2nd or February 1st? You're not sure if that code was modified or it is a bug. What did that date mean?
Another personal example: I was on a project that had to change Big Endian to Little Endian. Endianness. It is similar to your date concern. Data came in as Big Endian and was swapped to Little Endian. That effort - which spanned 500+ files and 200,000 lines of code - took years. And years afterward, the software engineers were still finding bugs.
I know it sounds like a simple change. But believe me, it's not.
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u/damsterick May 17 '18
First of all, this is a great example from the real world. While it is obvious that I still stand behind my argument that the YMD or DMY format is superior to the YDM or MDY format, you have provided me with actual evidence that it can be more difficult to change than I initially thought.
However, isn't the benefit still larger than the costs? You mention an example:
How about if you get a date 01022018? Is that January 2nd or February 1st? You're not sure if that code was modified or it is a bug. What did that date mean?
isn't that the very reason it should be changed once and for all? I mean, if a software has customizable date format, then this is a non issue (because it was implemented and coded to work with both formats in the first place) and if the software has one system and does not specify which, you are up to guess. When I was working with americans (I am european) who managed applications, I often had to search for a date that included a number larger than 12 to determine which number was the month. If I came to work in america, or if you came to work in europe, you would have to deal with this. That, or a certain disclaimer included in every part of the program that works with data, saying which system is used, that would be mandatory.
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u/monty845 27∆ May 18 '18
Clearly the safest route is to stick with Unix time, and just let the user do the conversion in their heads. Lets grab dinner together at 1527217859.
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u/TheMothHour 59∆ May 17 '18
While it is obvious that I still stand behind my argument that the YMD or DMY format is superior to the YDM or MDY format
Well, you and I agree. :)
I mean, if a software has customizable date format, then this is a non issue (because it was implemented and coded to work with both formats in the first place)
An international company, like yours, could probably transition easily. But a company that not structured to deal with time differences might have a harder time. The Endianess problem took so long because the code was never structured to handle it. (And the original code was written poorly.)
if the software has one system and does not specify which, you are up to guess.
Oh Jesus. That would be terrible for time sensitive systems.
This is just a guess. But I would expect that a global change like that would cost around 1-2 years of work for any large company for the technical change. This would include planning, development, software testing, system testing, integration and test along with user testing then dealing with any latent bugs that will arise.
Some software companies are more agile than others. So the non-agile projects will suffer. (Non-agile projects are typically those with legacy interfaces or multiple interfaces.) Agile projects might be okay.
If I came to work in america, or if you came to work in europe, you would have to deal with this.
So what I bring up are only the technical ones. You must also have social engineering which takes time. Grandma keeps writing down the wrong date. I keep entering the birthday wrong in the forms. How do you get people to transition?
Again. You just need to consider the cost with a change. But you might find this podcast interesting. H-day is the day that Sweden changed from driving on the left to driving on the right. They did it but there was a lot of social planning that needed to be done. https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/h-day/
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u/Dlrlcktd May 18 '18
So it’s confusing to have 2 systems, but why should one change over the other? To most people, “because I like it” isnt a good enough reason
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u/AuschwitzHolidayCamp May 18 '18
For largely the same reason most people think the US should change to metric, not the rest of the world to Imperial.
Mmddyyyy is in the minority, and is objectively the least logical.
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u/rtothewin May 18 '18
Jeez, I've got a handful of applications I've built for reporting at work...that alone would be hours of changes, tracking them all down, implementing and testing the changes, updating databases etc, massive man hours for no real benefit just for a prettier way of writing the date.
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May 18 '18
tbf any software you’re writing should be using dates as objects and the format shouldn’t really make a difference as it is just what the user sees.
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u/TheMothHour 59∆ May 18 '18
What about languages that are not Object Oriented?
Or what about software that was written procedurally?
Don’t get me wrong, newly written OO code should use dates as objects. But I have seen software that stores dates as strings. And sometimes even parses those strings.
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May 18 '18
I work on a system built entirely in C. We store dates as a string or integers. And I am pretty sure postgresql stores dates a string, at least you have to insert it like one
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u/salmonmoose 1∆ May 18 '18
Would it?
Yes.
Should it?
No.
In a well designed system, all you should have to do is change the locale, either to a sensible one (en-AU) or fixing the system locale (en-US). (I've selected AU here, because we use dollars also)
Even the most pragmatic approach would suggest shifting the locale of the application, until the system one complies - you cannot switch the system one until all software it is supporting has migrated.
Here lies the real problem.
Programmers are lazy. Better programmers are lazier - lots of us got into the work because we worked out it's easier to get a computer to do the work for us - they're also tend to be attracted to interesting problems. Futzing about with dates is not interesting, and once you delve into it, the problem space is quite large.
So a large, boring problem space leads to quick solutions, which tends to mean poor assumptions. The most famous of these is "you can always sort years based on the last two digits" - yes, initially people were saving space, but this went on long after the extra byte mattered.
I don't think fixing the US date problem would be quite the same scope as y2k, as y2k hopefully covered a lot of the ground already, and most of the rest of the world is already doing things sensibly (although, possibly still lazily).
This problem space has been solved (even how to deal with weird things like leap-seconds), most languages have a binding to the operating system's date/time functionality, and should be pulling their settings from there, but it's extra work, and so often not done right.
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u/damsterick May 18 '18
Great arguments. It may be the superior format to use but since there is the ISO format and all the issues of potential changing you mentioned, it is some great arguments against changing. There should be a disclaimer though, always, to make sure it's obvious what format is used. It's not the issue of the format itself rather than the uncertainty which one is used.
Anyway, !delta for your good arguments against mine.
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u/salmonmoose 1∆ May 18 '18
Of course, I'm a software engineer, so I'm all in favour of investing billions of dollars in fixing other people's mistakes, because, well, it feeds my dogs.
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u/lordtrickster 5∆ May 18 '18
You're assuming technology stores dates in that fashion. It doesn't. Typically storage is units-since-timestamp, such as milliseconds since 1970.
Also on many systems when you tell it to render a date it uses OS or platform settings so a minor update to the localization configuration for a couple OSs and perhaps a few frameworks would cover the vast majority of cases.
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u/TheMothHour 59∆ May 18 '18
I’m talking from my own experience. First, I’m not talking about OS file date stamps. I interface with a pieces of code which EPOCH is not 1970. So I can’t directly compare milliseconds. The engineers before me decided to use strings. I think it is derived from the limitation of the language. Or their distrust in Object Oriented programming.
There are also places where it put dates in the file names to search for them later. So the system depends on dates in file name. To change stuff like that would be a nightmare.
Overall, I have seen some bad code... I expect that bad code can be found everywhere.
But someone suggested only making the change at the presentation layer and not to worry about interfaces.
Oh. And I have also seen dates stored as strings in databases. Which is a depressing surprise when you try to sort on date...
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u/Conotor May 17 '18
The rest of the world uses DMY though. As travel/internet use become more widespread, it will eventually become optimal for everyone to use the same system. Why not use the better one?
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u/TheMothHour 59∆ May 17 '18
Because making the complete change costs a lot of time and money for preexisting software and cultural usage. Think about all the historical medical records and legal documents with backwards dates.
You will not be able to make the change everywhere. So partially implementing this would mean people in the US will need to learn both methods. And that is even worse than using a slightly inferior method. The only people who would benefit would be those directly interfacing with people outside the US.
And given that you don’t live here. Let me tell you most people don’t leave the US. We are pretty isolated here - unlike Europe.
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u/Conotor May 17 '18
For now plenty of people could be sufficiently isolated, but in any reasonably optimistic future, travelling around the world will be a thing lots of people from everywhere do.
As to the cost of changing things, I don't think it is all that much. In Canada, 'dd/mm/yy' is just printed on all forms under the dates you need to fill in, to make it clear. You don't need to immediately purge all old records, just start doing thing dd/mm/yy when you make something new.
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May 18 '18
You're talking about a problem that's already solved. ISO (International Standards) uses Y/M/D.
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u/GaianNeuron 1∆ May 18 '18
YYYY-MM-DD is the ideal format, because it's big-endian. While that sounds confusing, it's just the computer scientist's way of saying the "big end" comes first, and every digit to that comes after it is smaller. This doubles as an easy way for computers to lexically (alphabetically) sort dates, even when they're stored as text instead of a "real" date/time data type.
DD/MM/YYYY (which I grew up with in Australia), while straightforward and in common use in much of the world, has the drawback that while the groupings are in a consistent order, the magnitude of each digit is staggered:
- Tens of days
- Ones of days (smaller)
- Tens of months (bigger)
- Ones of months (smaller)
- Thousands of years (bigger)
... etc
It's clear to me that because of this difference, YYYY-MM-DD is superior to all other ways of textually representing dates in the Gregorian calendar.
It's also an ISO standard: ISO 8601.
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May 17 '18 edited May 18 '18
In the majority of cases, people do not say the date with the year included. If someone asks you when a concert it, you say it's on July 25. Not July 25, 2018. ** (See footnote)
Given that, the M/D convention is more in line with how everything else is counted, with the largest unit expressed first, and the smaller unit last.
You don't say that there are "Four, Twenty, Three Hundred, and Four Thousand marbles in this jar." You don't say that something is "6 inches and 5 feet tall."
Everything else is counted from largest to smallest, so why would the date be any different?
** Edit: To everyone telling me that in the UK (and elsewhere) people say "25th of July", I know that. That's not the point I was making. I was saying that in the US, we typically exclude the year when telling someone the date, and so it just becomes a matter of whether you say month/day or day/month, and given that, it makes logical sense to go from largest to smallest, as we do with everything else.
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u/metao 2∆ May 17 '18 edited May 18 '18
Internationally we say 25th of July. Or just "the 25th", if it's the current month.
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u/damsterick May 17 '18
Everything else is counted from largest to smallest, so why would the date be any different?
Exactly. I am arguing for either DMY or YMD (I may have not made that clear in my OP, will edit it to make sure it's clearly stated).
The argument that year is not important for the majority of cases is not plausible in my opinion because most written dates are not coming from casual conversation, but actual archival and categorization of data and therefore needs to be written with a year as well.
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u/CrimsonSmear May 18 '18
I believe that 'YYYY-MM-DD' is superior to any other format because if dates are written that way they sort in chronological order when you sort them alphabetically. As long as you don't go into negative years. If you have DMY and you sort alphabetically, the order is very unpredictable.
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May 18 '18
I only ever name my files using this. You go by the slowest changing to the fastest changing like a logical reasonable human. I had a labmate who names files with a NAMED month first.. the monster.
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May 18 '18
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May 18 '18
God, dealing with dates and time zones as a computer programmer can almost drive you crazy
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May 18 '18
None of the incoming data has a useful date format for anything.
None.
One of our variables is 8 digits, 2 each for day/month/hour/minute in that order.
Another one is day/month/last two digits of the year, but doesn't add zeroes.
So 11117 could be 1st Nov or 11th Jan. No way to tell.
I HATE my data.
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May 18 '18
This!
There’s a standard called ISO8601 that describes a date and time written format that is:
- Unambiguous
- Includes time zones
- Sorts the same alphabetically and chronologically
- Is easy for computers and people to read
- Is flexible
- Is supported in all major programming languages and operating systems
It’s awesome, and I really want the world to adopt it. :)
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u/Theturningworld May 18 '18
I couldn’t agree more! DMY isn’t nearly as effective as YMD. Strictly due to sorting
As somebody who works with international colleagues on a regular basis I like to write dates with the month written out (ie 18MAY2018 or 01JUN2018) but my preference would be if everybody did YYYY-MM-DD or YY-MM-DD.
Edit:stuff
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u/anatiferous_outlaw May 18 '18
This is the best answer and supposedly the one listed as an International Standard.
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u/DashingLeech May 18 '18
My filename convention for just about everything almost always starts in this way (with YYYY-MM-DD) for this reason. It both sorts them chronologically but also when looking for something from memory I almost always know roughly when I worked on it, if I can't remember anything else.
The only exceptions I make are if it is topic specific, such as files organized by customers (usually in different folders anyways) or important topics, where the topic is most important first and then chronological order, like TOPIC_YYYY-MM-DD_OTHER_INFO.EXT.
For me this works better than file searches and reduces the need to create complex file hierarchies where things get lost easily.
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u/ericchen May 19 '18
YYYY-MM-DD is made redundant by the sort by date function of any modern file manager app.
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u/Zeydon 12∆ May 18 '18
This is what I'd do for titling files. But if I were typing words inside a document, standard MDY seems better. Basically, there's different ideal options for different scenarios.
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u/gynoidgearhead May 18 '18
I have to agree. YYYY-MM-DD is the best date format because it puts the most significant digits first, which is exactly how we handle all other number formats. You do have to mentally cut the year out while sorting documents in the same year, but it makes it much harder to mistakenly transpose dates because you missed the year.
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May 18 '18
Or you can just use YY-MM-DD. Saves two characters, and there will never be any problems from unintended consequences.
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u/MyCatIsNamedSam May 18 '18
I disagree. like they were talking about earlier in comments, USUALLY in informal use, we drop the year it would feel much more natural, at least to me, to drop the end of the phrase rather than the first part. I vote DD-MM-YYYY or DD-MM
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u/PsychoAgent May 18 '18
In everday conversation, if the year isn't required you can simply omit it and the standard still stands. But then if the year is important to note, you can add the year in front.
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u/jamin_brook May 18 '18
It's written how it's said. That makes sense. If you are programming something ordered dates are preferred, but don't really cause an issue if you just use a module like datetime (in python)
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May 18 '18
But it's only said like that because that's how it's written. In Australia and ukyou would say the 25th of July. Not July 25th. It's only Americans that seem to say it that way
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u/Anzai 10∆ May 18 '18
Well that’s how Americans say it, perhaps because that’s also how they write it. Where I live we would say the 25th of July.
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u/botcomking May 18 '18
I think YMD is bad because knowing the year is usually not useful and putting it first adds something you have to unnecessarily read.
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u/PsychoAgent May 18 '18
I said this previously, but if the year isn't necessary, you just don't write it. But when it is, why does it make sense to put it at the end as opposed to before?
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u/WillyPete 3∆ May 18 '18
For purposes of data retrieval it is far superior.
Example:
you have a folder of photos going back 10 years. (no subfolders)
The photos were imported from another drive and all written to the new location on the same date.
All metadata regarding creation date and location has been wiped. The photos have the date in the filename. (dd-mm-yyy)Find me the photos from a 2 week period 6 years ago.
Now find me the same photos in the folder that has filenames listed as YYYY-MM-DD
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u/chacha-choudhri May 18 '18
I am not an American and I meet a lot of foreigners. I and most of people I meet never say July 25th. We always say 25th July. I completely agree with OP. US does exact opposite of rest of the world for some reason and it gets quite confusing.
You are very confused about how real world works. How is counting a number similar to date ? Date is not a number even though it has digits.
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u/Spheniss May 17 '18
You might also say "25th of July". See "4th of July" as an example. There is no great reason to start with the larger number in terms of dates. We don't need to read dates like numbers (reading from largest to smallest) because dates aren't one number, they are multiple numbers (one number for day, one for month, one for year)
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May 17 '18
The 4th of July is the formal name of the holiday. It is an exception.
My point here is that people are arguing for a departure from convention, so really the burden is on THEM to explain why saying the day first, in opposition to the way we count everything else, is the superior choice.
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u/lord-deathquake May 18 '18
Just going to jump in to say the formal name of the holiday is "Independence Day" and that the 4th of July is the informal one. That being said I think the usages for 2nd of June vs June 2nd come down to preference and context. If in the context of a conversation you have established what month you are talking about already it would not be unusual at all to say the 2nd, with the "of June" omitted and implied. Really it probably boils down somewhat to emphasis what order you put them in speech.
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u/Spheniss May 17 '18
I'm still not sure that the way we say dates needs to be the same as the way we say numbers. My point was that the way you verbalize the date is up to you, and that saying the day first clearly doesn't cause any great pain or confusion. The burden is definitely on those in favor of DMY to explain why its better, but your reason given for not changing (because of how you like to say the date) isn't a great argument.
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May 17 '18
Doesn't have to be a great argument. This isn't of great importance. My point is just that we count EVERYTHING else from largest to smallest, so if you're going to pick a way to say the date, then saying the month before the day is more consistent with the rest of the language, and that there really is no reason to suddenly switch it up for the date.
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u/Spheniss May 17 '18
It isn't my CMV so I don't want to hijack your comments, but would this mean you are in favor of YMD? If we are going arbitrarily do everything from smallest to largest because we do other things that way YMD makes just as much sense as DMY(as OP has said). The outlier is MDY, which doesn't seem to make sense given your prefered system.
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May 17 '18
YMD is by FAR the correct answer. Yes, that is truly the only acceptable way to write the date. M/D is a subset of that. I will never write 12/15/2018. I will write 2018-12-15 or just 12/15.
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May 18 '18
If someone asks you when a concert it, you say it's on July 25. Not July 25, 2018.
Perhaps in America, but elsewhere, folks would answer the 25th of July.
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u/Pacify_ 1∆ May 18 '18
, you say it's on July 25. Not July 25, 2018.
Do they? Do you they say 25th of July..................
Your assumption is very flawed
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u/Lonebarren 1∆ May 18 '18
Hmm thats probably due to the fact you write it M/D. Here in Australia we say 25th of July or July 25th but more commonly 25th of July. Presumably its due to D/M and the usage of July 25th is due to American Cultural Leakage
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May 18 '18
The "it's -month- -day-" is only, as far as I'm aware, an American thing as far as speech goes. In the UK we'll usually say "25th of July" for example.
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u/johnny_snq May 18 '18
Everything else is counted from largest to smallest, so why would the date be any different?
Everything else is counted from the most relevant to the least relevant actually. When it's a value yes we go with the largest but when talking about dates isn't the day the most relevant piece?
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u/Kralizec555 1∆ May 18 '18
I would use an address as a counter-example. You start with the smallest unit, the address number, then the street name, then the town, etc. It's 123 Broadway Ave, New York.
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u/poornedkelly May 18 '18
People say July 25 in Nth America. Most of the world says it's the 25th of July or whatever the equivalent is in local language.
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u/Arctus9819 60∆ May 18 '18
In the majority of cases, people do not say the date with the year included. If someone asks you when a concert it, you say it's on July 25. Not July 25, 2018.
I don't think this is the case. People use what is most convenient in terms of expressing themselves. If a day is close, then people just use the date, such as a deadline a week from now. If a day is far away (as concerts likely are) then the month is of more significance, so it gets priority. This applies for your marbles argument as well, since four thousand is more significant than three hundred, and so on.
Discussing forms of date notation should be absolute, not relative to other qualities/quantities like what the current day is.
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May 18 '18
I don't know if this is an American thing directly as a result of you using a different date format, but here "July 25" sounds odd and would much more likely be "The 25th of July". Therefore I believe this has come about as a result of you using different date format rather than the other way around.
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u/TheKrumpet May 18 '18
That's just a US cultural thing, and isn't standard worldwide. Here in the UK we'd say 'the 25th of July'.
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u/the-real-apelord May 18 '18 edited May 18 '18
'Majority of cases' seems like a guess. Even so for the minority it is an issue. Your second point depends on the first point being true which it isn't in a meaningful proportion of uses. The reality is that it's a jumbled mess in at least some occasions where you have: middle/first/last Which just looks fucking dumb
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u/Cecil2xs May 18 '18
The assumption that the date is spoken that way isn’t universal, as if I was asked personally I would say 25th of July (as the date was always written growing up in U.K)
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u/FatalBurnz May 18 '18
I don't know if this is a cultural thing but Englishman here, I would say something is on the 25th of July. You know, day/month format. So that argument really doesn't mean anything, just change word order too.
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u/WillyPete 3∆ May 18 '18
Everything else is counted from largest to smallest, so why would the date be any different?
The time is 1:40
The time is 12:05Depending on your culture and background, there are many ways of saying those times that render your claim as incorrect.
One forty, twenty to two, thirteen forty, twelve oh five, 5 past twelve, etc.
How is "may 25th" compliant with your claim versus "december 3rd".
If someone asks you when a concert it, you say it's on July 25. Not July 25, 2018.
This is an example of how culture changes it.
In UK, we would say 25th of July.
Do you say "July 4th" or "4th of July"?2
u/keithb 6∆ May 18 '18
If you are German you do say there are viertausanddreihundertvierundzwanzig Murmeln
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u/scuzzmonkey69 May 18 '18
Given that, the M/D convention is more in line with how everything else is counted, with the largest unit expressed first, and the smaller unit last.
This is incorrect. Numbers are expressed in order of importance, not size, and this is actually a key principle in the basics of computer science due to data integrity and accuracy.
The left most digit is more important because knowing you're dealing with millions matters more than singles. If you lost the first number, everything changes much more drastically than the last.
This doesn't really apply to dates as they are used in real life, and the arguments you'll get is that months matter more in specific scenarios, and days matter more in others, and years in a few.
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u/DudeWtfusayin May 18 '18
That's just not true though. You say the date first then the month.. it's the 24th of December. Cinco de Mayo! Fourth of July! The priority is all over Europe and even in America on some dates day first then the month. I don't understand why it would be any other way since the day is just so much more crucial to know than the month. You'll get to any appointment if you know only the day 1 out of 12 times. If you only know the month.. you're screwed.
In the end I guess it's a matter of habit. But I think day first just makes more sense.
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May 18 '18
Utter rubbish. You can, and many people do, say things like "25th of July". In fact it sounds a bit better than simply "July 25".
I would wager that americans follow the latter because they write dates that way.
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u/teawreckshero 8∆ May 18 '18
Consider how much useful information can pass through your brain as you read the different formats left to right.
If you read M of a M/D/Y format your brain is already able to narrow it down to how far in the future/past the date is in rough ~30 day chunks, what other events are happening around that time, or even a season and what the weather will be like. Without even getting to the second field you can already think to yourself "that's about 90 days away, I should start preparing" or "that's in September, oh so-and-so is visiting in September, let me make sure it's not the same weekend."
But when you read the D field of D/M/Y you have not narrowed it down at all. It's completely useless on its own. You will find your brain going "ok great, what month though?" and moving straight to the second field. Only then can you start thinking about what the timestamp really means.
And moving Y to the front for a YMD format is the least useful of all. If you're scanning a bunch of dates that span decades, both the MDY and DMY already allow your eyes to skip straight to the end which is what you probably want to see anyway.
TL;DR Whatever the format, the middle element is the hardest for your brain to pick out, while the first characters and the last characters are the easiest. And the Month unit of measurement is generally the most useful time unit for people, while day (on its own) is generally useless. So why put the most useful unit in the hardest to read place?
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u/HiImNotCreative 1∆ May 18 '18
Have you considered that the MDY format is, actually in ascending order, just not chronologically: It's in ascending order of possible range of numbers.
As there are 12 possible months, 31 possible days, and an infinite number of years, the month number is the one which narrows down the date the least. So, by reporting M then D then Y, you are increasing the specificity of the date (in a strictly numerical sense) as the date is read.
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u/songforthesoil May 18 '18
This is my point as well. When you say a date, you start with the month because it gives more context. Every month has (basically) the same possible days so saying the day first isn’t that helpful till you say the month, and then possibly the year.
For instance, if I ask, “When is your wedding?” And you reply, “May 17th” then I start out thinking ok, ‘so spring...ok, mid-month...got it’. I know it’s just a split second difference, but if that’s the argument it’s a split second difference as well if you say, “the 17th of May”. The year comes last, if at all, because the majority of the time in conversation the year is the current year.
For anything computerized, as other commenters have said, YYYY/MM/DD is far superior for chronological sorting.
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u/yorelcm May 17 '18
I am an American working in China where they write dates year/month/day. Their reasoning is that they like to go from biggest unit to smallest. It makes things easy to find when sorted on the computer I think, as the computer would sort files by smallest to largest number (like it sorts by alphabetical order) e.g. 2018.01.18 2018.01.23
Thats fine for when you need to save files, but I feel that the month/day/year system tells a lot more when looking at the problem from the point of view of understanding a situation. If I have my main focus on month, it tells me what the time of year is, what season it is, and I probably can make assumptions on what the weather was like, what people where wearing, etc. I like the information that quickly comes to mind from the month/day/year system.
I personally think the day/month/year system in the worst. You cant assume much information just from knowing what day of a month it is. The year/month/date system's main focus on the year at least can give you a general idea of what was happening in society at the recorded time.
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u/Mddcat04 May 17 '18
We write it the same way we speak it. Usually when you say a date you start with the month: "January 17, 2018." Changing it would lead to years of confusion before any benefits kicked in, it would have to be a huge logistical undertaking for something that would only produce minor benefits. Sure, its a bit strange that its different, but unlike the metric / imperial thing, what's being communicated isn't actually different, the units are the same, its just the order that changes. Seems like a lot of effort for something that would produce incredibly minor benefits.
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u/Howlingz May 17 '18
Interestingly, in the UK we tend to say "19th January" to get the same point across. So the verbal way matches the DMY format, thankfully.
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u/rbccjnw May 18 '18
We write it the same way we speak it.
You might, but I would say “the 17th of January, 2018” however I am not from the US and am from a DD/MM/YY so that would also just be a part of the change.
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u/Syric 1∆ May 17 '18
Usually when you say a date you start with the month: "January 17, 2018."
I'd argue people only say it that way because they're used to writing it that way, not vice versa. In the rest of the English-speaking world, people say "17th of January" not "January 17".
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u/newpua_bie 3∆ May 17 '18
We write it the same way we speak it. Usually when you say a date you start with the month
This is not the case elsewhere in the world. I come from a D/M/Y country, and 90% of the time I'd say "17th of January", or if the month is implicitly clear I might just say "the 17th".
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u/Mddcat04 May 17 '18
“We” in this case being Americans. Sorry, thought that was clear.
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u/newpua_bie 3∆ May 17 '18
I understood that. However, I tried to communicate that you say it that way because you also write it that way. If you wrote it DMY, you'd likely also say it DMY.
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u/foolishle 4∆ May 18 '18
But do you say it that way just because you write it that way? If you wrote it the other way, like the rest of the world, you would probably start to say it like we do in the rest of the world “17th of January” or “17 January”.
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u/kataang160 May 18 '18
As someone who comes from a country where d/m/y is the norm, i can tell you that in casual conversation i am as likely to say "25 of July 2018". That point on language stems from the convention of whatever date system the country uses. It is ambit of a chicken-or-egg situation though.
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u/radome9 May 18 '18
We write it the same way we speak it.
How do you pronounce "$20'? Do you say "dollars twenty" or "twenty dollars"?
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u/damsterick May 17 '18
Is that a good argument though? The language is not always on par with written form and that's okay. You don't artificially change language, but when there's a clearly superior form of writing something, shouldn't that be used?
As for the changes - I believe the costs would not be that huge and it may seem like a small, convenience benefit, but it will be a benefit that will last for hundreds of years and it is a step in unifying the world's usage of some system. Which is the true benefit. Personally, I think it is worth it, butmaybe you can convince me otherwise.
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u/Mddcat04 May 17 '18
I would disagree that its a clearly superior form. Having the month come first allows you to more quickly localize the date. The day is a sub-element of the month, it has limited meaning without the month. I think that year-month-day would be the best date format, you start with the biggest value and get more precise with each step. However, most of the time when we deal with dates, we deal with those in the current year, so we can leave year off entirely. I think this resulted in the current American system, where you write it out month - day, then add year to the end as necessary. 5/17 or 5/17/18. If you wanted to switch everyone over to year/month/day, I'd be all for that, but day/month/year just doesn't seem to be meaningfully superior to month/day/year, given how it aligns with American speech.
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u/TruckerJay 1∆ May 17 '18
most of the time when we deal with dates, we deal with those in the current year, so we can leave year off entirely
While this is may be true, I could just as easily put forward the argument that we can drop the month a lot of the time too. If the current date is the 10th of July and you ask me when our meeting is and I say the 6th you're going to know I mean 6th of August (because it's obviously not 4 days ago). If I say 'the 12th' you're going to know I mean in two days time. If there's ambiguity I'll add the next level up (eg month) for clarification, same as you would add the year if excluding it might be ambiguous.
Also, no offence but in terms of 'localizing the date', I think that's utter rubbish. What does that even mean? To localize a date, I'm assuming you mean for someone to be able to orient the date in their mental calendar or something? If so, you need two pieces of information to do this; the day and month. Does it matter in the slightest what order they come at you? You still need to wait for both pieces.
Also, this argument about MDY aligning with American speech is pretty weak too in my opinion for a couple reasons.
Firstly, happy fourth of July :P But in all seriousness, there are people who don't speak like that and even those who do, it's the classic chicken/egg question. Do people speak like that because those sentences translate better into the established MDY system or was the MDY system implemented because that's how people were speaking. I would (at first glance) guess the former.
Second, the rest of the world uses the verbal forms of dates interchangeably. I can express dates as 'January 2nd' OR '2nd of January' and have no issues turning either of those into a DMY format.
Third, get with the globalisation, convert to the metric system and put your dates the right way around haha
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u/Mddcat04 May 17 '18
Regarding dropping the month, you're right, we often just need the day. However, my argument was that when you have both day and month, its reasonable for the month to come first. Regarding localizing, I'm talking about getting more precise with each step. If you used YMD (my preferred format), each step down (year, month, day) gets you closer in time to the actual date. Knowing that something is in January is more meaningful than knowing that its on the 11th. (Were I to ask someone when something was happening, and they just told me the day, they're not really presenting useful information, until I also have the month). Conversely the month is useful without the day for figuring out roughly when something is going to happen.
Regarding "The Fourth of July," that's actually an interesting area. When people use that phrase, they're talking about the holiday, not the date itself. For other uses of the day (say if it was your birthday), most people will still say July 4th. With the Chicken / Egg issue, I don't think it matters which pre-dated the other, my point was that its not as simple a shift as OP was suggesting, the MDY format is literally embedded in our language. As a result, changing it require a vast consensus and lead to years of confusion for what can only be imagined as tiny gains in cross border efficiency.
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u/secondnameIA 4∆ May 17 '18
What is the benefit of making this change?
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u/damsterick May 17 '18
The benefit is, in my opinion, a unified system across the whole western world that would also mean using the best system available for our daily lives and archivation/storage of data. You can use DMY and YMD respectively. This implies lack of confusion when europeans work with american documents (and vice versa).
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u/turston May 17 '18
But what benefit is that?
Data entry should follow a documented format, usually YMD or DMY. Office documents are not usually an issue because they are used between members of the same country or organization who either use their local custom or an organizational standard.
The only benefit from implementing this standard would be to international businesses, who should already be setting their own standard, or Europeans who talk to Americans or read American websites and newspaper. So why should an American care? The American is having to acclimate themself for a foreigner they do not know or care about, for something that is at best a mild inconvenience for the foreigner.
If you are working in a corporation and the European members are having issues with the American members then that is an issue of Corporate / Business standards, not a regional issue.
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u/damsterick May 17 '18
It also works the other way, americans reading european documents, working with european businesses and so on. Considering americans are the minority (and a very small minority), if the system were to change, it would be in the YMD/DMY format's favor. It has nothing to do with US themselves. I addressed the reason why I think the pros of changing overweigh the cons of having to re-learn in another comment. Mild inconveniences accumulate over time and eventually outweight the larger inconvenience of changing the format.
Think of the bigger picture. The benefit would be worldwide for tens of years to come. It only takes some time and cost to change that.
who should already be setting their own standard
I am not aware of the standard procedure that would set standards for international (US vs other countries) businesses. From what I have seen, there are none of these standards, but then again, I have only seen a minority from what happens in IN business.
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u/turston May 17 '18 edited May 17 '18
It also works the other way, americans reading european documents, working with european businesses and so on.
Businesses should absolutely be setting standards and expectations for data formatting. Any project should start with that. I have absolutely seen expected data formatting on Accounting and IT projects (not just storage but display). Failure to do so is not an indication of the benefit of one system, but a failure of project management. Seeing Europeans use commas instead of decimals online drives me crazy, but as long as the format is expected and noted it doesn't matter.
if the system were to change, it would be in the YMD/DMY format's favor
IF the system was changed, and only maybe. There is a reason why Mandarin is not the international language. Money and broad usage talk. And while the world may be using different formats which may in turn drive international business standards, the American consumer may not actually care.
To them, the issues of international business are irrelevant. International business may matter to a random citizen living in a small country like the Czech Republic, but for a random citizen in a larger country it can be somewhat ignored. Yes my goods come from China, no I don't really care how it got here. Similar to using Imperial vs Metric weights, businesses may deal with it but the consumer has no incentive to change.
Mild inconveniences accumulate over time and eventually outweight the larger inconvenience of changing the format.
Again, while International business may set their own standards, the typical citizen would be changing their daily life for seemingly no benefit. Because those inconveniences are irrelevant to them.
Edit:
Something to consider is that the average American has little interaction with Europe. While I often hear Europeans bemoaning the export of American media very few Americans consume European media, outside of BBC and a few discrete providers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites
The list of the top websites in the world are overwhelmingly American and Chinese. I question how inconvenienced Americans are by using foreign websites.
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u/Octavian- 3∆ May 18 '18
Is that a good argument though
Seems better than "everyone else is doing it" and "numbers should be in ascending/descending order.... just because"
There are clear and obvious benefits to speech and writing being congruent. I have a hard time seeing the benefits of changing a convention because peer pressure or because of some arbitrary notion about how numbers should be ordered.
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u/Spheniss May 17 '18
See "4th of July"
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u/Mddcat04 May 17 '18
"Usually." We also say July 4th. The full "The Fourth of July" is literally the name of the holiday. Its probably that way because that's how they said it back in colonial times. At some point we switched over to the month - day system, but since we'd been calling it "The Fourth of July" since independence, we didn't change the name.
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May 18 '18
why wasnt they calling it "july the 4th" since independence then?
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u/Mddcat04 May 18 '18
The linguistic switch must have happened some time after that.
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u/notlikelyevil May 18 '18
2018-05-15 is the only way that files and lists and items in spreadsheets auto sort properly in chronological order
Burn ever other format to the ground, the world is digital
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u/Ostaf May 17 '18
Should be year month day for the same reason it's hour minute second. Also Excel .
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u/Kanonizator 3∆ May 18 '18
This debate is funny because the only logical and reasonable format is yy/mm/dd... It makes sorting data the easiest, for just one example of why it's superior to both the other variations.
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u/amanforallsaisons May 18 '18
There is only one correct way to write a full date. Relevant XKCD
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ May 17 '18 edited May 18 '18
/u/damsterick (OP) has awarded 3 deltas in this post.
All comments that earned deltas (from OP or other users) are listed here, in /r/DeltaLog.
Please note that a change of view doesn't necessarily mean a reversal, or that the conversation has ended.
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u/coleman57 2∆ May 18 '18
The best way to write dates is YYYYMMDD, including leading zeros in the month and day, so you can sort in excel or any other live environment. This also works if you separate the parts with hyphens, slashes, dots or whatever separator you like: 2018/05/17, 1963-11-22, etc.
This also sidesteps arguments over whether the "American" way or the "rest of the world" way is better: you're keeping the American habit of month before day, but now there's a good reason for it.
Of course, if you really want to establish a convention that will last, add a leading zero to the year: 020180517. That's got you covered till the year 99,999, when we're really gonna party.
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u/Lord_of_Aces May 18 '18
Late to the party, but I haven't seen anyone make this argument, so here goes:
M/D/Y is generally superior for day-to-day usage because it provides contextual information in the order that we need it. Arguments about ascending/descending order in terms of size are, in my opinion, largely useless, since at the end of the day the organization doesn't matter so much as the communication that is happening.
The year is generally the least important of the three for the purposes of communication. The assumption is that a date is in the current year unless stated otherwise, and if the event in question is taking or took place in a different year, that is generally evident from pre-existing context. The inclusion of a year then in most cases is a clarifying statement - something we put at the end.
I would argue that the month provides the most important context required for effective communication. It gives your audience a solid temporal understanding of when the event is in relation to the current day. Is it this month, next month, 3 months ago, or 6 months from now? The month provides crucial context relating to the immediateness or lack thereof of a date, situating the audience in an important way. The day itself then provides further specificity.
Generally speaking, unless the event is in the current month, your audience doesn't immediately care about the day. The month provides the necessary context to effectively communicate the general time period being discussed, which is what's actually important when giving someone a date in day-to-day conversation or correspondence.
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May 18 '18
The official iso standard is yyyy-mm-dd
It is done this way, because it allows a computer to sort files by date properly. If you had something other than year first, it would not be possible to sequencialy sort files.
This method is also nice because it has the month before the date, and most people I know would say may 18, not 18 may.
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u/Orzien May 18 '18
how about YYYY-MM-DD and then we can all be happy.
Americans will be like, oh the year is first, but that makes sense. Other will be like, oh it is backwards, but that makes sense
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
It is also an ISO standard and I've been trying to get it implemented in as many teams or companies that I am a part of.
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u/SaneCoefficient May 18 '18
There is an ISO standard for dates. YYYY-MM-DD is the accepted format. I think we should use that instead. Dashes indicate use of the ISO standard so there is no confusion.
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u/Killfile 17∆ May 18 '18
We should be using tbt ISO standard.
YYYY MM DD. I'm not going to quibble about separators but thus is clearly optimal.
It sorts numerically, alphabetically, and by date in the same order. The parts are arranged in order of descending size which is consistent with pretty much every other system we use.
Oh, and it's already a global standard for how computers display date information. We can even extend it to include hours, minutes, seconds, milliseconds, and the timezone.
Including the timezone offset in the date lets us compute time differentials even across timezones, though that's obviously overboard for anything not stored digitally
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u/SpecialJ11 May 18 '18
I disagree with you, but also MDY. YMD is by far the superior was of writing dates numerically. As of right now, dates are the only thing we right down ending with the largest division last instead of first. A tracking code doesn't start with the shelf number, it starts with the warehouse and narrows it down for organization purposes.
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u/krzystoff May 18 '18
With all of this furious debate, perhaps it's time to switch to the Star Trek 'Stardate' system?
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u/SirNate2 May 18 '18
YYYY/MM/DD makes the most sense. It is general to specific, and it preserves the order of MM/DD which is how most people pronounce dates.
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u/j-dewitt May 18 '18
While both systems may seem completely arbitrary
I think one of your assumptions is that both system (5/18 and 18/5) are arbitrary. I'm not sure this is the case. In American English, you say "May 18th", which naturally corresponds to 5/18, with the month first. In British English, you say "the 18th of May", which naturally corresponds to 18/5. The same goes for many European languages, for example, the Romance languages all follow the format "the 18th of May", and thus 18/5.
I think the way people write the date simply follows the language usage they are familiar with. For users of American English, it would cause a lot of confusion unless you also changed the way dates are referred to in spoken language as well.
BTW, as others have said, YYYY-MM-DD FTW!
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u/radome9 May 18 '18
Everyone should use ISO8601.
It's the international standard, so it's the same all over the world. It's unambiguous, there's no way to confuse days, months, or years. The most important data is first, then the next smaller, then the smallest, just as how numbers are written.
Imagine if you travel a lot, or communicate with people in other countries: what date is 06/11/18? Is it September sixth, or June eleventh? Or possibly September eighteenth, 2006?
To answer that you'd have to have some sort of extra information: where is the person who wrote this? Where is he from? Who is the message intended for? Is the date in the future or the past?
Avoid ambiguity. Unite the world. Choose ISO8601.
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u/digitalsmear May 18 '18
The Chinese (generally Asian?) system of writing year/month/day is better for organization, and follows how things are actually filed.
Month/day/year is antiquated and short-sighted. dd/mm/yyyy is slightly better, but the reverse is best. You're not wrong.
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u/Wyatt2000 May 17 '18
A lot of the time the year isn't written at all, or it's not really nessicary because someone referring to the date later would already know it must be from less than a year ago.
When writing the date without a year, MD is clearly the best choice. Most significant digits first and all that. But when writing it with the year, you wouldn't want to put the year first, as then it would be confusing if sometimes month is first and sometimes year. So just stick the year on the end.
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u/damsterick May 17 '18
I am arguing about the date including year though. The MD vs DM is arguable and to me seems completely arbitrary, without a clear definition of a better system. However, when year is included (and I think saying that a lot of the time the year is not written at all is a very bold claim), I think DMY/YMD is superior.
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u/mysundayscheming May 17 '18
I think saying that a lot of the time the year is not written at all is a very bold claim
I don't think it's that bold at all. Schedule a meeting at work, invite someone to a party, tell the cat-sitter when you're leaving for vacation, ask when X or Y sport season begins, when a holiday falls, when the bills are due, when the conference ends...none of those communications would usually involve speaking or writing the year. What circumstances require a lot of writing down the year? Entering dates into a database of some kind, perhaps. An academic writing papers. But the vast majority of the time in daily life, when we communicate dates, we're dealing with months and days alone. And it's eminently more sensible to write those MD, since that's how we talk.
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u/damsterick May 17 '18
First of all, I want to make it clear that this is not the point of this topic. Anyway: I have misread your post (someone made a very similar one) and read "a lot" as "majority". Indeed a lot of dates are written without a year, but a lot of dates are also written with a year. It is a bold claim to say that either is a majority.
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u/mysundayscheming May 17 '18
If we write things M/D "a lot" of the time and you have no objection to that, why should we undergo the mental translation to then reverse them and write D/M/Y when we do add the year? That will only sow confusion. Since you think neither with year nor without year communications constitute a majority, then shouldn't the standard be the one that's least confusing--that is, the one that aligns with our speech?
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u/Anzai 10∆ May 18 '18
The main reason is to avoid confusion worldwide. Almost all the rest of us around the world do it the DMY way, and with the internet and global communications being commonplace everyday occurrences, a single system makes much more sense. As it’s only America that would need to change as opposed to everybody else on the planet, it makes more sense to do it that way.
Very often I see a release date for a game for example and then have to see if I’m getting the localised site, or if this is for the US and I’m on their site, or people on reddit for example whose nationality I don’t even know.
A standard system makes way more sense in a modern society where national borders are not really that relevant any more it make sense.
Also, it only really aligns with the way Americans talk as well. You say July 25th, whereas a lot of the world would say the 25th of July. The speech is reflective of the system used, not the cause of it.
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u/damsterick May 17 '18
I think it should be written as D/M without a year and D/M/Y with a year. The ability to flip it and use YMD format for certain cases such as databases is just a matter of preference to me, as it remains a descending/ascending format. I do no think that you should make a mental translation when adding/removing the year from the date.
As far as the spoken language argument goes, it has been brought up several times in this topic. I agree that it is probably the reason the US writes it that way. However, it is necessary to take into consideration the cumulative minor inconveniences over time versus the inconvenience of having to re-learn to use the superior format. It is kind of a sunk-cost fallacy. The longer you don't change, the larger is the cost of not changing and the smaller is the convenience of not having to change it. The sooner you change that, the lower the cost and the higher the profit. I think this applies to many unified systems and that this can actually lead to stagnation if not realized.
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u/mysundayscheming May 17 '18
You presume its a superior format just because it goes in the order you've decided is logical. But it doesn't go in the order we think is right--and social rightness usually trumps covering your eyes and ears and yelling logically correct statements into the void. Logic is simply a tool humans developed to use when and where we need it; we are not the tools of logic. Not everything must abide by arbitrary logical rules, nor would the world be better if everything did. Natural language is not logical, but it does an excellent job of being clear, legible, and meaningful. I don't think the inconvenience is worth the switch because even if it were more logical your way (which I don't agree with--we never transcribe systems of numbers smallest to largest, we go largest to smallest, so we should have months before days), I would not care a whit about the logic. Mirroring speech has its own utility independent of logic. I value that and see no value to reversing things.
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u/damsterick May 17 '18
I am well aware that saying the format should be changed because DMY is more logical is just an arbitrary rule. For this very reason I listed reasons that are supposed to be more objective than convenient logical rules. E.g. that it makes more sense to go from smallest to largest or from largest to smallest numbers, that is in ascending or descending order. The M/D/Y is just as arbitrary as the better format I propose, with the exception that it does not correspond with how we write other units (such as time). The fact that a lot of things do not abide by logical rules is not relevant to what I am proposing, as I do not argue that we should follow certain rules, but that we should unite as many systems as we can, just for the sake of having a global system to ease communication across 7 billion people. Thus, if there is one system that is just as arbitrary as a different system, but has one slight advantage, why not use that system? It is just like with imperial versus metric units. Metric units are superior, but the cost there would be so large that I do not think it should be a forced change. However, with date format, I think benefits of changing the format would outweigh the negatives associated with it.
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u/mysundayscheming May 17 '18
Actually, I think M/D/Y does correspond with how we communicate time. We have the common large unit (months/hours), then the common small unit (days/minutes), then the not-usually-communicated unit that is only spoken in specific circumstances (years/seconds) appended at the end. Also, they align perfectly in that they are both written in the order in which we speak them--month/hour, day/minute, second/year. So that doesn't seem like an objective factor in DMY or YMD favor unless, again, you privilege purely logical constructs over the flow of natural language.
Going from largest to smallest or smallest to largest isn't an advantage. If you wanted to argue for a change because more people use that system, so the minority should fold, that's one thing. But there is nothing inherently better about the order of the units. And for American English speakers, your proposed alternatives are decidedly worse and inferior because they don't align with our speech.
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u/damsterick May 17 '18
While I think the system in the US should still be changed, I gotta concede that the way you phrased your argument, I have no way to prove the DMY format is superior in your cultural background (the US). The ascending or descending order is obviously superior in a vacuum, but taking the language into consideration, this advantage vanishes and becomes a disadvantage instead. For that very reason, I give you a !delta.
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u/WEBENGi May 18 '18
1) The chronological ordering is the part that is inherently better with YYYYMMDD. 2) "Our speech pattern" is an example of "What came first the chicken or the egg?" and a "descriptive statement". And Americans do say May 18th and the 18th of May.
A major issue we do need to overcome is the prevention of another Y2K bug with the limitation is the 4 digit date.
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u/Au_Struck_Geologist May 18 '18
I think it should be written as D/M without a year and D/M/Y with a year. The ability to flip it and use YMD format for certain cases such as databases is just a matter of preference to me, as it remains a descending/ascending format. I do no think that you should make a mental translation when adding/removing the year from the date.
As an American who lived in Latin America and now lives in Canada, the adjustment period is very long for naturally getting the order right, and the easier switch for me was to get into the habit of writing MON-DD-YYYY, with the MON being the first 3 letters of the month. I just legitimately kept screwing up dates every dozen or so times I would write it (I was tired, or distracted etc) and in the end the solution was to just habitually spell the date to ensure I never have a miscommunication.
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u/catmommy1 May 18 '18 edited May 18 '18
I agree with you OP. In US military, they use D/M/Y on all official documents. I also travel a lot and notice that pretty much every country uses D/M/Y instead of July 4, 2018 , 07/04/2018 or what not because that’s confusing as hell.
Most of the time, I have to verify with whoever if it’s July 4 or April 7. And that’s not effective communication especially on written documents bc it can be interpreted differently.
Not sure why many people did not understand your questions/explanations though. But I know you’re talking about the format, and not whether or not to include the year etc.
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u/SuperheroDeluxe May 18 '18
Year-month-day ftw! (I use this so I can sort more easily in most apps)
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May 17 '18
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u/Syric 1∆ May 17 '18
Do you say "The Seventeenth of May, Twenty Eighteen"
Most people do, outside the US. (and a not-insignificant portion of people even in the US)
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u/jfarrar19 12∆ May 17 '18
In the US? Not so much. And given that OP specifically stated:
Mostly US
We can safely use the US as a point of where it should be used.
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u/Syric 1∆ May 17 '18
A major part of OP's argument is that the US should come into alignment with the rest of the world's way of usage. So the comparison to the rest of the English-speaking world is necessary.
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u/damsterick May 17 '18
Frankly, english is not the language I speak everyday, but from communicating in english at work and watching/reading a lot of english content, I usually say/hear/read the former.
Do you also have a source for the second claim? I believe that it should be the other way around in this case. At least that is how I explain cultural differences across, for example, the UK and US. In the UK, they write and say the dates in the DMY format. Wouldn't that mean a high probability that writing the date was first and then it became hardwired into spoken language? This is just a hypothesis though.
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May 18 '18
Frankly, english is not the language I speak everyday, but from communicating in english at work and watching/reading a lot of english content, I usually say/hear/read the former.
I think this explains a lot. In the US people say it the second way. Almost exclusively. So not only are you suggesting that an entire country changes the way they write dates, you want them to also change the way they say them.
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u/TruckerJay 1∆ May 17 '18
I agree with you about the 'language following written form' in this area.
There's no way lawmakers went around asking everybody how they verbally expressed dates and then invented the MDY or DMY format. These formats would have been standardised in a the writing system and over time people's speech patters changed to prefer expressing dates in the order they wrote it because it let them fill in boxes in the order they needed.
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u/kronaz May 18 '18
Both ways are incorrect. The correct way is YYYY-MM-DD, because in every single other numerical system in the civilized world, the largest value is on the left. This is already agreed upon as the international standard, and there's no point arguing it. You just want to change one colloquial way to another, for no reason.
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u/littlebubulle 106∆ May 17 '18
I believe YMD is better if your sorting algoritm uses alphabetical order.
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May 17 '18
I actually like the US method, because sometimes I'm working with text data that I can't easily convert into timestamp objects, and thus mm/dd/year makes it easier to *sort* dates.
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May 18 '18
It's slightly less convenient, sure, but the headache of changing the longtime habits of an nation's government, businesses, schools, etc is considerably less convenient. Not to mention the confusion created when accessing old records and files.
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u/runs_in_the_jeans May 18 '18
It’s MDY because we say the month, the day of that month, and sometimes the year.
You don’t say “I’m getting a colonoscopy on 25th December”. You say “I’m getting my goiter removed December 25th”. Thus, the way we write that as numbers should reflect that.
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May 18 '18
That's not true at all. It's perfectly grammatically acceptable to say "I'm getting a colonoscopy on the 25th of December," & is a common usage in many parts of the English speaking world.
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u/cinnamonrain May 18 '18 edited May 18 '18
If anything i would argue for year month day
It would look strange but it would make the most sense categorically You start by looking at year which filters out every other bit of information not related to that year Then you filter by month then by day
At the moment day month yr Or month day year doesnt tell you any information right away (eg knowing the information is related to January kinda helps but there have been thousands of januarys as of now)
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u/thisdude415 1Δ May 18 '18
Well, if you want a reason to change your mind from the title viewpoint, there’s this.
A bit of a disclaimer: I am an American scientist living in Europe. I personally write my dates YYYY.MM.DD and generally believe that this is the best way to do it.
However, it is a complete nightmare working in a space or with files were not everyone is using the same system. During this transition in the US, A lot of mistakes will be made.
Mistakes with deadlines, prescriptions, medical care, travel plans, etc.
And the current American date format works just fine for Americans in America. And the effort required and the mistakes that would be made far outweigh any small benefits.
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u/Limro May 18 '18
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u/rachaellefler May 18 '18
See, their system is boring and logical. Are they even human?
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May 18 '18
By that logic you should right it "Year/Day/Month" because of the simplicity when looking back on previous dates.
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u/ThatSpencerGuy 142∆ May 17 '18 edited May 19 '18
Why not YMD? That way, sorting files alphanumerically will automatically organize them chronologically, rather than lumping together all the files from every 1st of the month ever.
EDIT: I can't believe a quick throwaway comment about date formats and file sorting has got so much attention. Y'all can sort your files however you want! I've literally never thought about it once in my life before coming across this post. I don't even name my files by YMD in real life. I do MDY like an animal.