I’m sorry but it doesn’t make sense TO ME. Based on what I was taught, regardless of the month, I think what matters first is to know what day of the month you are in, if at the beginning, in the middle or at the end of said month. After you know that, you can find out the month to know where you are in the year.
What is the benefit of doing it the other way around?
EDIT: To avoid misunderstandings:
- I am NOT making fun OF ANYONE.
- I am NOT negatively judging ANYTHING.
- I am totally open to being corrected and LEARN.
- This post is out of pure and honest CURIOSITY.
So PLEASE, don’t take it the wrong way.
My guess is the month is most relevant to an agrarian society. It tells you where you are in the growing cycle that the entire culture revolves around. The day and year offer little practical utility to a 19th century farmer.
Oh, that make more sense and seems plausible! Thanks!
If you name your files YEAR-MONTH-DAY_Filename they be in chronological order when sorted by the name field.
YYYYMMDD is the only correct answer.
That’s not a good explanation for the question, because the convention was established before computers.
I mean it’s easier to sort like that for humans too.
I don’t think that’s true; before computers people would get used to one way or another and it would have 0 impact on their ability to compare.
When you are searching for a file in a filing cabinet of a finance department, it’d be a nightmare if records were filed by month first and year after.
I answered the one question he posed. What is the benefit of doing it the other way around?
It sorts by what seems to me historically by relevance, i.e. which day is asked more often because it seems a more frequent timeframe for everyday use in a medieval society compared to the month (with the seasons as something in between those two).
And I agree that since the digital age yyyy-mm–dd has significant advantages!
Ignoring the coding side of things…
It’s relative. And also works easier to navigate the calendar. If we’re planning something for next year I pull up next year’s calendar. If it’s this years and we’re planning something for later this year, when I hear you say August, that’s the month I go to. But if you say the 27th of August, The first thing I heard was the 27th which could possibly be this month or next month if it’s say the 28th today.
I don’t know, that’s just how I learned it in school so it feels natural for me to use/say.
This post kinda stinks of “why doesn’t the US just switch to metric? Are they stupid?”
Sorry if it gives that impression, it is not at all my intention, it is pure and honest curiosity. That’s why I avoided any bad word and put it in a subjective point of view (“I think / I believe”)
Not switching to metric is stupid. Fighting for independence from the empire, but then clinging to the imperial system that has only disadvantages over the metric system - that just screams not driven by reason
Year is the most significant (read: big) unit in the list, but it is the least significant (pertinent to daily life) unless you’re a time traveler. Of month and day, month is more significant than day in both size and pertinence, so it gets ordered first. But when sorting things into folders or file naming conventions, biggest category is always the best.
You articulated what I was thinking, better than I could have. This is it for me.
I’d add that there’s probably a lot of habit involved, plus the fact that everyone else does it.
So not only am I not used to saying “today is the 4th of May”, everyone around me isn’t used to hearing it either and might think I’m being weird.
It’s not just Americans. There are many countries in Asia where the default is year month day. If you ever had to organize files by name and date this is the supreme sorting order. Both Europe and North America are getting it wrong.
If this gets you mad don’t ever look into how the French count from 80 to 99. Or how languages disagree on what’s blue or green. These things happen.
I know about the Asians. I work in a Chinese run company and we use WeChat for internal communications. When I have to search for a message from a specific date I always get confused by the way the dates are displayed.
Why do Americans use MM/DD/YY for date, but not mm:ss:hh for time? Doesn’t that make the same amount of sense?
I don’t know! that’s why I’m asking!
Your looking at it from a digital era. When things were paper based, month-day-year made a bunch of sense.
Our work paper archives are stored in “year” boxes (used to be filing cabinets). Open those, and you have folders that have month-day-year on their tab label. This makes it so you can quickly go through the folders sequentially quickly. If you did YYYYMMDD, you would need to ignore the first 4 numbers. DDMMYYY, the labels won’t be in numerical order.
Putting files back, you look for the correct year, but then it’s easy to drop the folder back into it’s numerical position.
In a digital structure, filing records is automated and we can use a search function, so we do store digital files as YYYYMMDD.
American here. No idea. Either DD/MM/YYYY or YYYY/MM/DD are more logical, but here we are. When naming/renaming files and including a date in the name, I’ll usually do YYYYMMDD format somewhere. If I’m emailing/texting others, I use MM/DD/YYYY.
Fun little story, the department I work in recently began to work with some people over in the UK, and even though I brought up the date format differences, we’ve already had someone of gett the month and day flipped and it caused some confusion on our end.
It comes down to the variable weather in the US versus the UK.
The UK has maybe handful of weeks of actual hot weather, months and months of rain, and then some weeks of bitter cold. The day is more important than the month who cares if it’s March or September? It’s another day of rain and grey.
The US has extreme weather changes across the year, especially in the northeast where differences in US and UK English first began to diverge, intentionally and unintentionally. In a state like Massachusetts, knowing the month is important for things like setting the scene in letters “home” and so forth. The summer months and grossly hot. The fall/autumn is full of brilliant colors and mild weather followed by months of bitter, unrelenting cold winter. The spring months yield to green and mild weather again. Knowing that the month is April is very important because the 4th of April is going to be incredibly different from the 4th of September.
Source: Link
You little shit
LOL OK, thanks for the laugh regardless.
Am American and I hate the MM/DD/YY(YY) format. Unfortunately its what’s been taught and used as the standard date format for a long time.
I much prefer the ISO standard of YYYY-MM-DD. It’s the superior format logically moving from the largest calendar unit to the smallest. Also superior for date ordering files.
Yeah, I resently saw it and I agree with you.
To make sure its not December right away. Fuck that entire month. Everyone hates December so much they throw the years biggest party at the end of it.
As an American it was just what we were taught. However, when I started creating code and being pedantic about organizing files by date, I now prefer YYYYMMDD format as it is, chronologically speaking, superior when prefacing files with it. In this case, in my opinion, it’s better to have the year and then month first prior to day.
To each their own, variety is the spice of life.
What you say is interesting. Having a way of organizing time that suits your needs. That’s why I asked if there was any benefit in the way Americans (and apparently also Chinese) represent time.
Interesting thing about how Chinese time is organized is locations are also stated big to small. Last names then first names etc.
Locations have a last name and a first name in Chinese?
I mean the larger family name comes before the personal name. Implying a connection between number, place, and naming sequences
Chinese is also weird imho. If I remember correctly, they put the details of an action first in a sentece and the verb that defines the action itself goes last with some exceptions.
Hungarian comes to my mind which is similar and always follows the context first, details later rule. They use “yyyy.mm.dd.”, “family name first, given name last”, “country, city, street, street number order for locations”, and the word order of their grammar is similar too, details are always at the end of the sentence.
China’s first name is actually Jim, believe it or not.
ISO is my true north.
This is the only format that truly makes sense, as it is both unambiguous and, as you noted, sortable.
I write the date a bit different depending on which format its going on.
For example, computers like to sort things alphabetically. If I’m writing electronic diary entries, I’ll name the document as “2025-06-01.”
If I’m hand signing a legal document, I prefer to sign it as “01JUN2025” or “01JUN25” if space is an issue.
If the format is preselected and deviation isn’t allowed, I’ll just write it like everyone else does.
Personally, I like dating things in ascending or descending order. Day month year, or year month day.
Personally, I like dating things in ascending or descending order
Hey! Me too! 🤝
I’m a fan of the 01JUN2025 format. It’s unambiguous and uses about the same space as other traditional formats.
I don’t have a clue why we do MM-DD-YYYY and personally I hate how dates are done in the west, to a degree.
For a maths course I’ve been taking at college, I never use MM-DD in my notebook because that and DD-MM are stupid in my opinion. I always spell out the month first to ensure I don’t get mixed up. I honestly envy that some languages like Chinese and Japanese have an individual character to help distinguish between month and day.
Also, I would love if every country using the MM-DD or vice versa format could all agree on which format to use for everyday things.
Idk, maybe like all U.Sians traditions, this was an Old-World British thing Americans preserved, since it’s a more direct term of the English language, more direct than Day then Month
so unless it’s a special day, if not holiday, for U.Sians like 4th of July, by default, Month then Day
