> If you’re smart enough, you’ve probably also noticed that the American one makes no sense and is just awful That's simply not true. The American format is d

> If you’re smart enough, you’ve probably also noticed that the American one makes no sense and is just awful That's simply not true. The American format is designed to reflect how we normally pronounce dates or write them out in long form (eg "September 11th, 2001"). The European format is also flawed. It's similarly divided into three tokens (day, month, year) but they are ordered so that the tokens represent greater magnitudes of time moving from left to right, big-endian-style. The problem is each token is a decimal number which is traditionally written in little-endian-style. So like the American format, you still need special understanding of the format to read dates and they cannot be trivially sorted. The ISO 8601 format is little-endian all the way through so it is trivially sorted. UNIX time is even easier to sort and compresses much better, but it's rather difficult for humans to read.