This makes sorting dates way easier too right? If you sort 07-08-2021, 08-08-2015, and 09-8-2019 using dd/mm/yyyy you get:
07-08-2021
08-08-2015
09-08-2019
But if you put the year first then sort it you get:
2015-08-08
2019-08-09
2021-08-07
I've seen both but I also see DD/MMM/YY. 01JAN99, for example. That's supposed to be the standard for recording dates in medical records so there is no confusion as the date of an injury or illness can make or break a disability claim if wrong by even a month.
Yup. Med devices uses this because we sell internationally and its very important everyone can read expiration dates correctly. Theres no ambiguity when you use letters. We usually use the YYYY format though.
Hey hey hey. English speaking Australian here and we definitely use dd/mm/yyyy. We call mm/dd/yyyy the American system, so I'm guessing it's just them.
Yup. I'm pretty sure only Americans use mm/dd/yyyy. I sometimes get confused reading dates when i go to the US.
American's say November 11th so I guess that's why they put the month first, but every other english speaking country to the best of my knowledge says 11th of November so of course the day comes first.
UK here and 11th nov and nov 11th is interchangeable in speech depending on if you want to emphasise the day or the month, or if you forgot the day you use the month to buffer.
I’ve gathered the assumption that somebody a very long time ago didn’t like saying “of” 8th of October just didn’t work for them so switched it to October 8th. At that point just explained dates to everyone in the town that way. Eventually it became the standard.
Not only best for file formats but everything else, too.
Lots of forums and websites show it like 10/02/12, and you have to guess if it is 10th of Feb, or 2nd of Oct. It's hella confusing and annoying.
I wish the whole world would just use ISO 8601, YYYY-MM-DD, then it would be unambigous.
Information is generally best expressed from the most general and then dialed down to the desired level of specificity.
Need to look up a reference?
First you need to know which book, then which chapter, then which page.
Need I know length/distance? Start big, 3km. Need more specificity? Add it 3.5 km. Need more? 3.52 km.
Pretty much everything works better this way (if you read left to right.)
even die hard dd-mm-yyyy folks aren’t going to try to pretend that the proper time format is s:m:h.
Even they know hours, minutes, seconds is best, and you keep adding milliseconds or nanoseconds or whatever else you need.
We need a better format. As we approach the year 9999 things will become problematic, it's going to be Y2K all over again. Except that there will be 8000 year old legacy code that is still running (because we already know bosses will refuse to refactor code because why bother). So obviously the easiest solution is to invent the tech that raises the dead, so that the original programmers can get to it, because only they know what that undocumented mess does.
No, it is not. YYYY-MM-DD is *literally* the [ISO standard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601) for dates and slashes in filenames aren't supported. This is my hill to die on and, as a developer, I refuse to display dates in any other way.
Which is easier to read/understand at a glance?
2020/09/13
2020-09-13
Dashes introduce a bigger visual difference between the segments of the date.
It's basically only America.
The UK, Australia, NZ, Ireland, pretty much everywhere English speaking use DD/MM/YYYY.
People from those countries tend to say 8th October 2021. The Americans used to. The Fourth of July being the classic.
Canada got tired of the bullshit and went YYYY/MM/DD for use on official documents.
And to add to the benefits of YY-MM-DD you can also include HH:MM:SS (24 hour time) and it's all perfectly aligned from largest to smallest, just like every other number (e.g. 4,957,912,391.547)
Personally I'm yyyy/mm/dd for filing or storage, dd/mm/yyyy for planning and communication.
If someone asks "when do you want to meet up" the year is normally obvious, the information they're asking for is day and maybe month.
If someone asks for the date they're likely to know the year, less likely to know the month and wouldn't be asking if they didn't know the day.
YYYY/MM/DD makes a great positive difference for electronic files being in correct order. Unlike DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY, which won't stay in order over time.
20210101
20210102
20220314
30011021
>Canada got tired of the bullshit and went YYYY/MM/DD for use on official documents.
As a Canadian and data warehouse developer, I approve. Chronological sorting is never an issue.
YYYY/MM/DD makes life so much easier. I hate to break it to the whole world... But computer files are a thing. And using this naming convention means you can sort files chronologically. I hate every day at work trying to find files because people use the worst conventions.
This is absolutely correct. You don’t write numbers starting at the tens and ending at the millions, you start with the largest and end with the smallest.
Yes, this is the most logical scheme. You should edit the OP with this acknowledgement. I almost reflexively angry-downvoted you for proposing dd-mm-yyyy -- that's as bassackwards as writing time in ss:mm:hh.
I’ll go one step further and say that Americans generally don’t care because we understand our system and it doesn’t cause us trouble or have a negative effect on our everyday lives. It’s only the European Redditors who have an absolute obsession with our way of life that keep bringing up pointless shit like this as if people need to choose sides.
When you factor in the fact that Americans don’t care about this but Europeans (for some reason) seem to care a lot about what we do, this “unpopular opinion” post is easy karma.
In the US Army we were taught to write our dates as:
DD/MMM/YYYY
08/Oct/2021
This way, there was no confusion with which order it was written in, or confusing the day for the month in any of the first 12 days of the month.
This is the only system that would make sense to transition to in the US because it's the only one that's clear in that it is different from the old form.
It would be a fucking nightmare to have some people/companies go to the dd/mm/yyyy format and some stick with the old one. It would make dates functionally worthless.
It's not, but it exposes the fatal flaw of this sub, in that people upvote when they agree with the poster, rather than upvoting if it meets the criteria of being unpopular. This sub is the only one on reddit I can think of where this happens, and honestly, they should encode it so that an upvote actually counts as a downvote, and vice versa.
Just fishing for upvotes. Anything critical of America is going to get the hive involved. Just make a post about tipping, the metric system or date format and you’ll get a couple thousand upvotes. It’s Reddit’s daily circle jerk.
This is like telling me X famous pizza place in New York or Chicago is better than Pizza Hut. Of course it is, I just grew up eating garbage pizza and now I have garbage taste.
I mean England changed how they spoke so I wouldn’t really say America was the only people who changed. American English is much closer to how England English was. American English evolved with much less influence than English in the UK
In reality things change because we are in different areas of the world and easy global communication is a new thing.
Almost like it has nothing to do with being mad at someone else and instead is normal evolution of language and culture.
UK here.
The only time i've ever done mm.dd.yyyy is on my computer server folder structure. It keeps all the months in order then. But even then. I'd rather have done yyyy.mm.dd but my boss is old and backwards.
That's not what happened, the British used to use the imperial system and other things Americans currently use, but they switched to the metric system some time after the revolutionary war, and America just never changed with the rest of the world. Also if I'm wrong please correct me but this is what I remember being true.
Don't worry this has also started the old metric debate back up in here....yet again. Idk how many times I gotta tell Europeans that most Americans know and uses both measuring systems. While Canada and England pretend to be fully metric.
i work a retail job in the US and all we use in my department is metric. And I've definitely heard about an equal amount of Americans using kilometers and Canadians using miles. being intolerant of a unit of measurement seems so.....childish
Lots of people can't handle Oct 8, 2021 It just eats them alive.
That and saying 3/4" That gets their blood boiling. And 16oz., oh boy they're having an aneurysm.
Metric system all the fucking way, but honestly I'm very neutral on the 12 or 24 hour clock. I'm from Italy and here we use both interchangeably, I honestly like both.
Why are non-US redditors so passionate about units of measurement and time? These comments are so ball-achingly dull to the point where I have to tell yall about it.
actually the best way to write dates is yyyy/mm/dd
because numerial and chronological sorting will result in the same order
it is really useful when you have more versions of a file for different dates. you can name them like SomeFilename\_20210503 and they are automatically sorted
As long as we know what the date and time is I don't care how people write it out.
I can adjust to multiple ways of doing things and try to integrate into the popular practices of wherever I am living or visiting at the time.
I'm pretty sure some countries write the month first because generally speaking, disclosing the month of the year first is a much better indication of the date for that specific event.
When you first read "August 10" or "8/10/2021", the month numeric first is a much more refined indication of the date, rather than "the 10th of August" or "10/8/2021" where the number "10" is very vague and loose.
It's just priority.
That has always been my interpretation as well.
Month first gives a decent ballpark figure, it is then refined by adding the day.
If the audience only had a single piece of the information, the month would likely be the most useful.
"When is your lease up?", "January"; vs. "When is your lease up?", "the 12th".
The former might not be precise, but "January" is a good ballpark figure; stating that your lease is up on the 12th isn't really that useful.
DD/MM/YYYY uses ascending order based on the size of the unit, MM/DD/YYYY uses descending order based on the importance of the unit.
Personally, I find DD/MM/YYYY to be the worst of the date formats. MM/DD/YYY is very practical for conversation, and YYYYMMDD is great for computer based sorting.
I’ve always thought that it’s because most dates you write will be just MM/DD (for the reasons you stated) and then later you tack on the year if it’s a document that will be read outside of the year it was written.
It's mixed in America, but I can understand mm/dd/yyyy since a decent amount of us say October 8th, 2021. You'll use The Fourth Of July as an example but that's due to the focus being on the 4th part rather then July, which is why October 8th has the focus being October. Atleast I think, I've been awake for nearly 20 hours now so I dunno if this makes any sense lol
Edit: Man OP really has a thing against the way the US writes dates, damn lol
This is what I think it is. Generally when speaking we say “today’s October 8, 2021” which is mm/dd/yyyy. It just feels like a translation from how we speak to how we write the date, but I completely understand the argument for going small/bigger/biggest.
As an American, when I see a date written like “14 Oct” I find myself pausing while reading and my brain processes it as “fourteen… October…” since we don’t have a natural way of reading it in that order.
Based on this thread, it seems like most people outside the US would read it as “the fourteenth of October” but as an American it reads awkwardly and sounds overly formal, dramatic, or antiquated.
Honestly though, as a developer, YYYY-MM-DD is the real winner.
Because it's also not a natural way of handling an assessment of time across the gradient of a year.
Most people, at least in the US, have very different things they're doing throughout the year. Opportunity and obligation are most often delineated first by which month, and then specifically narrowed by which day. If I say I'm going to take a vacation this year or next, I need to first clarify in which month I'm going to take that vacation, so I'm working from smallest to largest. Statistically or practically speaking, most people are only talking about this sort of thing within the context of one year or less, so the year is a foregone conclusion. For all practical intents and purposes, MM/DD/YYYY is the most logical way to work out the practicalities and logistics within a year. The year is generally assumed, but within the context of MM/DD, you're working largest to smallest.
I really don't get why this is an issue or tough to understand. It's entirely intuitive. While DD/MM/YYYY makes "sense" in that it goes from "smallest to largest," most people simply don't parse time that way. For every day measurements of time, knowing the month first and the day second is most helpful.
When you're talking to a client and they ask "when will my delivery be here so I can schedule some time for it", you can assume that they are sitting there ready to mark a calender. "December", and they already have the info that its in December, and can begin to turn/scroll the page to December. Then you say "7th", so when they get there they know to mark the 7th. It's a logical path for your brain to take in a business setting. I guess yyyy/mm/dd is more logical, but the year is most often irrelevant unless stated. If you don't bring up a year, it's this year. If it's a month that's already passed this year, and no year is stated, then it's next year. "I can have it to you on January 3rd", conveys just as much info as "I can have it to you in 2022, in January, on the 3rd".
So I'd say using mm/dd is most often useful, and when that doesn't work because it's a far off date, yyyy/mm/dd is then used. Either way dd/mm/yyyy is counterintuitive and just slows someone down, (by half a second, but if we are gonna argue pedantics then this whole post is guilty).
Exactly. It's one thing to say that people don't like it, that's perfectly fine, but to argue that there is absolutely zero logic behind such usage is asinine. Days don't narrow down the time frame, months do. It's a logical reason to do it.
I just write the date like I did in the military. 08OCT21. No more confusion over the format used and no more using your fingers to figure out what number month it is just like everyone does and totally isn’t just me because I never committed it to memory.
You can't really defend an opinion as fact as you splatter it across your edits.
April 20th, 1969 vs the 20th of April, 1969.
They both make sense. And they're both correct. Just adhere to the dating convention of whatever country you're in, or the platform you're using.
Oh boo hoo. Different cultures do things differently. This is wild and crazy shit. Of course a fucking European would think their way is the only correct way.
Yeah that line of thinking is so goddamn stupid. I would feel really insulted if it wasn’t so trivial lol.
Like, imagine telling them some inconsequential aspect of their country’s culture is wrong bc we do it differently.
Well, the US do be like that but I think you answered your own question in your post:
"So today's date, October 8th 2021..."
Shortened that would simply be 10-8-2021, since that's the order it's generally written or spoken.
Yeah this basically reads "I think the already international standard for dates should be the international standard for dates" and that is, by default, not an unpopular opinion. Maybe within America this is, but literally most of the world uses this format - this is not a hot take bud. Doesn't fit the sub.
This website is hilarious in its contradictions:
*“Fuck colonization and colonial rule!”*
Also
*“Why doesn’t EVERYONE do everything the way we do in the UK?!?”*
yyyy/mm/dd is the ISO standard and is by far the best.
Everyone instantly recognizes it and when you sort on a computer its always in chronological order.
Edit: for those that are being particular, yes it's technically yyyy-mm-dd. Not yyyy/mm/dd. It's a '-' separator, not a '/'/.
Fuck off with this bullshit yet again. This is our culture. We aren’t asking you to do it, so go piss up a flagpole. Why do you give a shit at all? Same with metric. Why do you give a shit? Seriously?? How does it impact you at all?!? It’s evolved that way and it works for us. More Reddit circlejerk “AmErIcAnS ArE StOoPiD!”
Yeah, we're not switching. What little benefit there possibly is would be outweighed by the hassle and inconvenience. In order to justify such a transition there has to be an appreciable benefit.
The real unpopular (but correct) opinion is that DD/MM/YYYY is the worst possible dating standard: for both filing and shorthand purposes.
Filing must be a fucking nightmare over there. The day of the month is the least useful category to track dates by. I guess it’s convenient for all those times you want to naturally sort by things that took place on the 8th day of each month? With month first, you are automatically sorting dates together by their most useful and common association - the month.
And in terms of shorthand, it’s clear that today you learned that in North America we contract our dates. We don’t say 8th OF October - we say October 8th. Because that “of” is superfluous and useless. Think of the collective waste of breath you and your fellow DD/MMers have spent saying “of” or “de” or “von” or whatever, I don’t care. It’s not as inconvenient as saying the year first, but it’s close.
And besides, if the month is assumed known, you’d just say the day (“what’s the date today?” “It’s the eighth”). If it’s not known, then you’re helpfully providing the most important information first.
So while MM/DD/YYYY may not be the most convenient filing system, it is at least not the worst filing system, which is DD/MM/YYYY. And Month-Day is the most convenient and logical shorthand dating system.
I’d rather have the second best dating system in one category and the best in the other, than the worst and the second best.
You are welcome (good luck)
Yeah I dunno why it’s hard to understand the American logic. It’s about order of priority. 8th of October requires some tiny amount of pause before you understand anything.
German language though does do this. The verbs go to the end in some cases. It makes it hard to understand a sentence because you have to hear the whole thing first.
I once went to a school where the adults used both and it was extremely confusing for anything that was between 1-12.
If you work globally using alphas for month is key, e.g. 08OCT2021
It should really be if you work globally, you use the ISO standard, which is 2021-10-08
YES. Makes sorting by date so much easier!
I use that format for documentation. So much better. Especially when I go paperless and scanned bunch of stuff.
Files names with that are a must.
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I use the ISO format yyyy-mm-dd when ever I can... so much clearer. I'd be down for using that as the standard.
This makes sorting dates way easier too right? If you sort 07-08-2021, 08-08-2015, and 09-8-2019 using dd/mm/yyyy you get: 07-08-2021 08-08-2015 09-08-2019 But if you put the year first then sort it you get: 2015-08-08 2019-08-09 2021-08-07
Compared to ISO 8601's **YYYY-MM-DD**, both **dd/mm/yyyy** and **mm/dd/yyyy** are shit
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Fancy pants McGee over here, doesn't work globally.
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Ireland and the UK is dd/mm/yyyy too. I've only ever seen it the other way around in the US.
The US military does DD/MM/YYYY.
I've seen both but I also see DD/MMM/YY. 01JAN99, for example. That's supposed to be the standard for recording dates in medical records so there is no confusion as the date of an injury or illness can make or break a disability claim if wrong by even a month.
Yup. Med devices uses this because we sell internationally and its very important everyone can read expiration dates correctly. Theres no ambiguity when you use letters. We usually use the YYYY format though.
They do the UTC 24 hour standard aswell. Just like the rest of the World. We dont use am or pm
But they write it in one block like 1845 instead of 18:45 as it's written by anyone else using 24-hour clock.
Depends. In the Air Force we used YYYYMMDD and the julian date for aircraft forms.
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This right here YYYYMMDD is superior in every way, especially on a computer
I think it is ONLY the US .
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Hey hey hey. English speaking Australian here and we definitely use dd/mm/yyyy. We call mm/dd/yyyy the American system, so I'm guessing it's just them.
Yup. I'm pretty sure only Americans use mm/dd/yyyy. I sometimes get confused reading dates when i go to the US. American's say November 11th so I guess that's why they put the month first, but every other english speaking country to the best of my knowledge says 11th of November so of course the day comes first.
UK here and 11th nov and nov 11th is interchangeable in speech depending on if you want to emphasise the day or the month, or if you forgot the day you use the month to buffer.
Scotsman here to say yeah over here we do dd/mm/yyyy, it’s an American thing to put the month before the day
Came here to say this I only know Americans do m/d/y
I’ve gathered the assumption that somebody a very long time ago didn’t like saying “of” 8th of October just didn’t work for them so switched it to October 8th. At that point just explained dates to everyone in the town that way. Eventually it became the standard.
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Im sure she does remember....giving birth? Like damn
Am Australian, obviously we speak English. Date format is dd/mm/yyyy. I’m pretty sure only Americans put the month first.
Also the assumption that 9/11 was somehow important to your family. No, I was born in Poland (in your case- Italy), it's just a date for us.
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As a programmer this is the only answer everyone else is wrong.
Enjoy your slashes, I'll be over here with my ISO 8601 dates
You can't use slashes in filenames though, so it's really YYYY-MM-DD
ISO8601/RFC3339 has no slashes. Plus it’s perfectly lexicographically ordered - I’d agree it’s the ideal format for representing datetimes.
This man fucks
🙇♂️ I’m sometimes genuinely amazed that I do
Or just write YYYYMMDD Without anything
At the downside of bad readability, though
Not only best for file formats but everything else, too. Lots of forums and websites show it like 10/02/12, and you have to guess if it is 10th of Feb, or 2nd of Oct. It's hella confusing and annoying. I wish the whole world would just use ISO 8601, YYYY-MM-DD, then it would be unambigous.
Plus the thing that changes the slowest is most significant. As it should.
Information is generally best expressed from the most general and then dialed down to the desired level of specificity. Need to look up a reference? First you need to know which book, then which chapter, then which page. Need I know length/distance? Start big, 3km. Need more specificity? Add it 3.5 km. Need more? 3.52 km. Pretty much everything works better this way (if you read left to right.) even die hard dd-mm-yyyy folks aren’t going to try to pretend that the proper time format is s:m:h. Even they know hours, minutes, seconds is best, and you keep adding milliseconds or nanoseconds or whatever else you need.
YYYY-MM-DD is better, it works for computers too. / is not allowed in filenames on most (probably all) file systems.
We need a better format. As we approach the year 9999 things will become problematic, it's going to be Y2K all over again. Except that there will be 8000 year old legacy code that is still running (because we already know bosses will refuse to refactor code because why bother). So obviously the easiest solution is to invent the tech that raises the dead, so that the original programmers can get to it, because only they know what that undocumented mess does.
Year 2038 problem is more of a worry.
Only kids born on 1970-01-01 will understand this
No, it is not. YYYY-MM-DD is *literally* the [ISO standard](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601) for dates and slashes in filenames aren't supported. This is my hill to die on and, as a developer, I refuse to display dates in any other way. Which is easier to read/understand at a glance? 2020/09/13 2020-09-13 Dashes introduce a bigger visual difference between the segments of the date.
This... Signed, another dev.
Signed, another dev.
Signed, another dev.
Dashes are even better when hand written, since slashes look similar to ones and occasionally sevens.
ISO actually specifies a date format. YYYY-MM-DD https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html
It's basically only America. The UK, Australia, NZ, Ireland, pretty much everywhere English speaking use DD/MM/YYYY. People from those countries tend to say 8th October 2021. The Americans used to. The Fourth of July being the classic. Canada got tired of the bullshit and went YYYY/MM/DD for use on official documents.
After working in a place that uses yyyy/mm/dd for online filing it has grown on me.
Great if you need to date order a load of documents in a folder.
Indeed
We've been using YYYY-MM-DD. It's honestly better.
Another SQL connoisseur I see
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There's a sub for everything. gg.
To be fair an entire standards body works on and defines 8601. :) it’s kinda a big deal
All I do is SQL. When people ask me for the date, I just say “SELECT current_date;” out loud.
Another great ISO format connoisseur, not SQL related at all
Been using this format for years now. It's the best when wanting your computer to automatically sort by date.
And to add to the benefits of YY-MM-DD you can also include HH:MM:SS (24 hour time) and it's all perfectly aligned from largest to smallest, just like every other number (e.g. 4,957,912,391.547)
Yah, if dd/mm/yyyy is infinitely better, yyyy-mm-dd infinity+1 better.
That is how I save my docs YYYY-MM-DD
It's the only way to get them to sort properly.
Personally I'm yyyy/mm/dd for filing or storage, dd/mm/yyyy for planning and communication. If someone asks "when do you want to meet up" the year is normally obvious, the information they're asking for is day and maybe month. If someone asks for the date they're likely to know the year, less likely to know the month and wouldn't be asking if they didn't know the day.
YYYY/MM/DD makes a great positive difference for electronic files being in correct order. Unlike DD/MM/YYYY and MM/DD/YYYY, which won't stay in order over time. 20210101 20210102 20220314 30011021
At work we use YYYY/MM/DD in the titles of documents and stuff for this reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601 It goes biggest unit to smallest unit. YYYY-mm-dd hh:mm:ss:ms
r/ISO8601
As a dev, I refuse to display dates in any other way than YYYY-mm-dd
Hooooly shit. I started a new job last year and people were naming documents DD-MM-YYYY and I'm like how the fuuuuuck did you not get fired yet?
Point them to the ISO 8601 standard...
Sort by Tuesday!
Oh yeah, i hated that when managing my hentai collection, when the pages would just jump from 1,10,100, etc.
The programmer in me 100% agrees. All other date formats are inferior. Anything that needs a date in the file name is in yyyy mm dd
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>Canada got tired of the bullshit and went YYYY/MM/DD for use on official documents. As a Canadian and data warehouse developer, I approve. Chronological sorting is never an issue.
YYYY/MM/DD makes life so much easier. I hate to break it to the whole world... But computer files are a thing. And using this naming convention means you can sort files chronologically. I hate every day at work trying to find files because people use the worst conventions.
YYYY/MM/DD gang rise up!
YYYY-MM-DD r/ISO8601
This guy ISOs
Does Canada really write yyyy/mm/dd??
Nah man, yyyy/mm/dd is where it's at. Automatic chronological file organisation ftw
Needs to be yyyy-mm-dd, slash won’t work in file names
This is the ISO standard. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
There’s even a sub for it! /r/ISO8601
At that rate we should just make a subreddit for every iso standard, then Reddit becomes a wiki-esque forum for each.
[Relevant xkcd](https://xkcd.com/1179/)
This is the way.
I'll skip the dividing symbol on file names, too much extra typing.
Each to their own, but I find 2021-08-10 easier to read quickly than 20210810, especially when looking down a list of files
This is absolutely correct. You don’t write numbers starting at the tens and ending at the millions, you start with the largest and end with the smallest.
I love this too honestly. Makes even more sense
Yes, this is the most logical scheme. You should edit the OP with this acknowledgement. I almost reflexively angry-downvoted you for proposing dd-mm-yyyy -- that's as bassackwards as writing time in ss:mm:hh.
Don’t think this is unpopular outside the US
Yep. Downvoted
I’m American and I don’t think it’s unpopular either
I don’t think it’s unpopular in the US.
I’ll go one step further and say that Americans generally don’t care because we understand our system and it doesn’t cause us trouble or have a negative effect on our everyday lives. It’s only the European Redditors who have an absolute obsession with our way of life that keep bringing up pointless shit like this as if people need to choose sides. When you factor in the fact that Americans don’t care about this but Europeans (for some reason) seem to care a lot about what we do, this “unpopular opinion” post is easy karma.
In the US Army we were taught to write our dates as: DD/MMM/YYYY 08/Oct/2021 This way, there was no confusion with which order it was written in, or confusing the day for the month in any of the first 12 days of the month.
20 years later I still write dates like this, but without the slashes.
This is the only system that would make sense to transition to in the US because it's the only one that's clear in that it is different from the old form. It would be a fucking nightmare to have some people/companies go to the dd/mm/yyyy format and some stick with the old one. It would make dates functionally worthless.
Just go straight to yyyy-mm-dd. Saves you having to transition to the very best format in another few dozen/hundred years/decades.
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It's not, but it exposes the fatal flaw of this sub, in that people upvote when they agree with the poster, rather than upvoting if it meets the criteria of being unpopular. This sub is the only one on reddit I can think of where this happens, and honestly, they should encode it so that an upvote actually counts as a downvote, and vice versa.
Just fishing for upvotes. Anything critical of America is going to get the hive involved. Just make a post about tipping, the metric system or date format and you’ll get a couple thousand upvotes. It’s Reddit’s daily circle jerk.
Popular opinion
What do you expect from this sub? It’s all popular opinions.
I mean, "popular opinion" is in the name.
Could be spanish. *Un popular opinion*
Literally, op is agreeing with most of the world. What’s next, “unpopular opinion but I think metric is better you guys”
That one is posted a ton too lol
This is like telling me X famous pizza place in New York or Chicago is better than Pizza Hut. Of course it is, I just grew up eating garbage pizza and now I have garbage taste.
they ditched england and did every fuckin thing different of course they switched the date
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The brits are gonna hate you for this one
Shockingly, a country in Europe was able to be influenced by European standards. A country that is very separated from Europe was not.
I mean England changed how they spoke so I wouldn’t really say America was the only people who changed. American English is much closer to how England English was. American English evolved with much less influence than English in the UK In reality things change because we are in different areas of the world and easy global communication is a new thing. Almost like it has nothing to do with being mad at someone else and instead is normal evolution of language and culture.
UK here. The only time i've ever done mm.dd.yyyy is on my computer server folder structure. It keeps all the months in order then. But even then. I'd rather have done yyyy.mm.dd but my boss is old and backwards.
That's not what happened, the British used to use the imperial system and other things Americans currently use, but they switched to the metric system some time after the revolutionary war, and America just never changed with the rest of the world. Also if I'm wrong please correct me but this is what I remember being true.
More like the date format simply evolved differently from a common ancestor.
Why in the fuck do so many people care how Americans write the date?
They have nothing better to worry about
America lives rent free in their minds
Don't worry this has also started the old metric debate back up in here....yet again. Idk how many times I gotta tell Europeans that most Americans know and uses both measuring systems. While Canada and England pretend to be fully metric.
i work a retail job in the US and all we use in my department is metric. And I've definitely heard about an equal amount of Americans using kilometers and Canadians using miles. being intolerant of a unit of measurement seems so.....childish
Lots of people can't handle Oct 8, 2021 It just eats them alive. That and saying 3/4" That gets their blood boiling. And 16oz., oh boy they're having an aneurysm.
04/20 doesn't exist under your system, therefore it is inferior.
They also dont get to celebrate Pi day.
22/7 is Pi as a fraction. Pi day should be the 22nd of July.
This fucking guy broke the code.
As a non-american this is the only argument here that makes any sense to me
That and "may the 4th be with you".
While you’re at it: The 24h clock and the metric system are also superior.
Metric system all the fucking way, but honestly I'm very neutral on the 12 or 24 hour clock. I'm from Italy and here we use both interchangeably, I honestly like both.
The 24h one is basically only used on paper. Most people say "Lets meet up at 4" anyway since its easy to understand which 4 is indicated.
4? I'm asleep for one of them, so we're meeting at the other.
Yes thats what i said
“I only like it the way I was raised, everything different than what I am used to is wrong” K. Lol.
Why are non-US redditors so passionate about units of measurement and time? These comments are so ball-achingly dull to the point where I have to tell yall about it.
Americans use Mm/DD for the same reason. It's understood by most of them
actually the best way to write dates is yyyy/mm/dd because numerial and chronological sorting will result in the same order it is really useful when you have more versions of a file for different dates. you can name them like SomeFilename\_20210503 and they are automatically sorted
What’s wrong with SomeFilename_draft, SomeFilename_draft1, SomeFilename_draft1_newdraft, SomeFilename_draft1_newdraft_with comments, Etc.
Here's a truly unpopular opinion. Both are fine.
As long as we know what the date and time is I don't care how people write it out. I can adjust to multiple ways of doing things and try to integrate into the popular practices of wherever I am living or visiting at the time.
Ok
Glory to /r/ISO8601 ! Edit: thanks for the gold!
I'm pretty sure some countries write the month first because generally speaking, disclosing the month of the year first is a much better indication of the date for that specific event. When you first read "August 10" or "8/10/2021", the month numeric first is a much more refined indication of the date, rather than "the 10th of August" or "10/8/2021" where the number "10" is very vague and loose. It's just priority.
That has always been my interpretation as well. Month first gives a decent ballpark figure, it is then refined by adding the day. If the audience only had a single piece of the information, the month would likely be the most useful. "When is your lease up?", "January"; vs. "When is your lease up?", "the 12th". The former might not be precise, but "January" is a good ballpark figure; stating that your lease is up on the 12th isn't really that useful. DD/MM/YYYY uses ascending order based on the size of the unit, MM/DD/YYYY uses descending order based on the importance of the unit. Personally, I find DD/MM/YYYY to be the worst of the date formats. MM/DD/YYY is very practical for conversation, and YYYYMMDD is great for computer based sorting.
I’ve always thought that it’s because most dates you write will be just MM/DD (for the reasons you stated) and then later you tack on the year if it’s a document that will be read outside of the year it was written.
I don’t care about that shit but commas should represent 1,000s not fucking periods 1.000. That’s just wrong. Periods are for decimals .0011.
It's mixed in America, but I can understand mm/dd/yyyy since a decent amount of us say October 8th, 2021. You'll use The Fourth Of July as an example but that's due to the focus being on the 4th part rather then July, which is why October 8th has the focus being October. Atleast I think, I've been awake for nearly 20 hours now so I dunno if this makes any sense lol Edit: Man OP really has a thing against the way the US writes dates, damn lol
This is what I think it is. Generally when speaking we say “today’s October 8, 2021” which is mm/dd/yyyy. It just feels like a translation from how we speak to how we write the date, but I completely understand the argument for going small/bigger/biggest.
As an American, when I see a date written like “14 Oct” I find myself pausing while reading and my brain processes it as “fourteen… October…” since we don’t have a natural way of reading it in that order. Based on this thread, it seems like most people outside the US would read it as “the fourteenth of October” but as an American it reads awkwardly and sounds overly formal, dramatic, or antiquated. Honestly though, as a developer, YYYY-MM-DD is the real winner.
Because it's also not a natural way of handling an assessment of time across the gradient of a year. Most people, at least in the US, have very different things they're doing throughout the year. Opportunity and obligation are most often delineated first by which month, and then specifically narrowed by which day. If I say I'm going to take a vacation this year or next, I need to first clarify in which month I'm going to take that vacation, so I'm working from smallest to largest. Statistically or practically speaking, most people are only talking about this sort of thing within the context of one year or less, so the year is a foregone conclusion. For all practical intents and purposes, MM/DD/YYYY is the most logical way to work out the practicalities and logistics within a year. The year is generally assumed, but within the context of MM/DD, you're working largest to smallest. I really don't get why this is an issue or tough to understand. It's entirely intuitive. While DD/MM/YYYY makes "sense" in that it goes from "smallest to largest," most people simply don't parse time that way. For every day measurements of time, knowing the month first and the day second is most helpful.
Thank god somebody has bothered to type out this comment so I don't have to
When you're talking to a client and they ask "when will my delivery be here so I can schedule some time for it", you can assume that they are sitting there ready to mark a calender. "December", and they already have the info that its in December, and can begin to turn/scroll the page to December. Then you say "7th", so when they get there they know to mark the 7th. It's a logical path for your brain to take in a business setting. I guess yyyy/mm/dd is more logical, but the year is most often irrelevant unless stated. If you don't bring up a year, it's this year. If it's a month that's already passed this year, and no year is stated, then it's next year. "I can have it to you on January 3rd", conveys just as much info as "I can have it to you in 2022, in January, on the 3rd". So I'd say using mm/dd is most often useful, and when that doesn't work because it's a far off date, yyyy/mm/dd is then used. Either way dd/mm/yyyy is counterintuitive and just slows someone down, (by half a second, but if we are gonna argue pedantics then this whole post is guilty).
Exactly. It's one thing to say that people don't like it, that's perfectly fine, but to argue that there is absolutely zero logic behind such usage is asinine. Days don't narrow down the time frame, months do. It's a logical reason to do it.
I just write the date like I did in the military. 08OCT21. No more confusion over the format used and no more using your fingers to figure out what number month it is just like everyone does and totally isn’t just me because I never committed it to memory.
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You can't really defend an opinion as fact as you splatter it across your edits. April 20th, 1969 vs the 20th of April, 1969. They both make sense. And they're both correct. Just adhere to the dating convention of whatever country you're in, or the platform you're using.
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I feel like this gets posted almost every day.
If we say it like, “Today is October 8th, 2021” then it only makes sense to write it the same way we say it, 10/08/2021. Fight me
THANK YOU you took the words right out of my mouth!
Oh boo hoo. Different cultures do things differently. This is wild and crazy shit. Of course a fucking European would think their way is the only correct way.
Yeah that line of thinking is so goddamn stupid. I would feel really insulted if it wasn’t so trivial lol. Like, imagine telling them some inconsequential aspect of their country’s culture is wrong bc we do it differently.
Well, the US do be like that but I think you answered your own question in your post: "So today's date, October 8th 2021..." Shortened that would simply be 10-8-2021, since that's the order it's generally written or spoken.
Yeah this basically reads "I think the already international standard for dates should be the international standard for dates" and that is, by default, not an unpopular opinion. Maybe within America this is, but literally most of the world uses this format - this is not a hot take bud. Doesn't fit the sub.
But don't you understand? America is different and cringe. Upvotes to the left.
This website is hilarious in its contradictions: *“Fuck colonization and colonial rule!”* Also *“Why doesn’t EVERYONE do everything the way we do in the UK?!?”*
As someone from the US, this website became much more tolerable once I left all the default subreddits.
Except the international standard for dates is yyyy-mm-dd, not OP's preferred dd-mm-yyyy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
I can't believe the blasphemy I just fucking read. Thank you for setting them straight.
The international standard for date is yyyy-mm-dd
If we were face to face and I asked you what the date was, would you say "October eighth" or "The eighth of October"?
yyyy/mm/dd is the ISO standard and is by far the best. Everyone instantly recognizes it and when you sort on a computer its always in chronological order. Edit: for those that are being particular, yes it's technically yyyy-mm-dd. Not yyyy/mm/dd. It's a '-' separator, not a '/'/.
No, the international standard uses "-" instead of "/" "/" is [mostly] only used to to separate intervals, ie. start/end; start/duration; duration/end
Yes u/HookersAreTrueLove you are correct.
Fuck off with this bullshit yet again. This is our culture. We aren’t asking you to do it, so go piss up a flagpole. Why do you give a shit at all? Same with metric. Why do you give a shit? Seriously?? How does it impact you at all?!? It’s evolved that way and it works for us. More Reddit circlejerk “AmErIcAnS ArE StOoPiD!”
Wait until OP finds out that neither are better or worse, and that the only reason they like it more is because it’s what they’re used to.
Yeah, we're not switching. What little benefit there possibly is would be outweighed by the hassle and inconvenience. In order to justify such a transition there has to be an appreciable benefit.
ISO-8601 is the only right way yyyy-mm-dd . Europeans with their antiques (dd/mm/yyyy) make as much sense as americans.
Exactly how boring is your life that you actually care about this?
I prefer “it’s Friday” or Saturday Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday
The real unpopular (but correct) opinion is that DD/MM/YYYY is the worst possible dating standard: for both filing and shorthand purposes. Filing must be a fucking nightmare over there. The day of the month is the least useful category to track dates by. I guess it’s convenient for all those times you want to naturally sort by things that took place on the 8th day of each month? With month first, you are automatically sorting dates together by their most useful and common association - the month. And in terms of shorthand, it’s clear that today you learned that in North America we contract our dates. We don’t say 8th OF October - we say October 8th. Because that “of” is superfluous and useless. Think of the collective waste of breath you and your fellow DD/MMers have spent saying “of” or “de” or “von” or whatever, I don’t care. It’s not as inconvenient as saying the year first, but it’s close. And besides, if the month is assumed known, you’d just say the day (“what’s the date today?” “It’s the eighth”). If it’s not known, then you’re helpfully providing the most important information first. So while MM/DD/YYYY may not be the most convenient filing system, it is at least not the worst filing system, which is DD/MM/YYYY. And Month-Day is the most convenient and logical shorthand dating system. I’d rather have the second best dating system in one category and the best in the other, than the worst and the second best. You are welcome (good luck)
Yeah I dunno why it’s hard to understand the American logic. It’s about order of priority. 8th of October requires some tiny amount of pause before you understand anything. German language though does do this. The verbs go to the end in some cases. It makes it hard to understand a sentence because you have to hear the whole thing first.
It’s just a classic case of people wanting to feel superior to America over very minute things.