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I also agree that adopting yyyy-mm-dd just reduces ambiguity. However, it is an interesting linguistic observation that the way people say dates influences how
by supernova87a 6y ago
I also agree that adopting yyyy-mm-dd just reduces ambiguity.
However, it is an interesting linguistic observation that the way people say dates influences how they prefer to write them. And I know it's basically a religious argument, but I prefer the American way.
Saying "we'll schedule that for October 10th", or "let's meet on September 18th" you get an idea from the first words when roughly it's going to be (Oct, Sep), and then the specific.
The only time we seem to use the day number first is when we celebrate "the 4th of July".
The European way -- or at least British way -- they say "we'll schedule that for the 10th of October". If you had to cut that sentence off before you completed it, you would be left asking... which month in general are we talking about?
Anyway, the way people are used to saying the words definitely seems to translate into how they express it in writing.
- sabellito 6y agoHaving a date format that's different from the rest of the whole world to optmise for the case of being cutoff when speaking doesn't sound super reasonable.
- supernova87a 6y agoWell, I don't really mean it's for the protection of the case that your sentence gets cut off -- when is that going to happen in practice. I meant in terms of word order when thinking about the concept of date from general to specific, (I at least) think it's more logical. And in yyyy-mm-dd, it comes first. But, yes it is only a convention. We do lots of other things in society without similar rationale.
- function_seven 6y agoIt's like how calculators and telephone keypads are opposite. Each one feels natural in its own domain, but weird if used for the other purpose (i.e. Try dialing a phone number you're used to dialing all the time, but on a calculator. You can do it, but it don't feel right) With identifiers, we sometimes go from specific>general. Street addresses start with the house number first, then street, then city, state, etc. Domain names are the same. Most specific first, general TLD last. But then there are directory paths, (drive > folder > file), phone numbers (country > area > exchange > subscriber), and legal citations (code/title > chapter > section > paragraph > etc.) Which makes the American date format truly an outlier. 2020-09-13 seems right to me, but I think I prefer 13 SEP 2020. It's more aesthetic I think, and it also recognizes that there is no month called "9". Days and years are naturally numbered, but months have names.
- __d 6y agoIn the early days of Internet, host naming was not yet standardized. The UK academic network used a least-to-most specific naming scheme (JANET NRS) (like, uk.tld.institution.machine) whereas the US adopted the most-to-least ordering (eg. machine.department.organization.tld). As the DNS became the dominant name-to-IP mechanism, the JANET NRS faded away, and we're all now used to most-to-least specific host names. But hey, at least the most-specific bit isn't in the middle.
- akvadrako 6y agoIt’s better to go from general to specific, just like with numbers. So the American order makes more sense if you exclude the year. So Y-M-D isn’t just less ambiguous, it’s also superior to the other formats on merit.