Well yes, as it's an extention of code written in the 1970s, when dates were most commonly referred to with 2 digits. Even when javascript was written (and lik

Well yes, as it's an extention of code written in the 1970s, when dates were most commonly referred to with 2 digits. Even when javascript was written (and likewise with things like perl and php - and of course the underlying function dated back to the 70s ), it was still quite common for people to write dates by hand as 6/6/96 for June 6th 1996, hence people would often write something like print day() + "/" + mon() + "/" + year() If you wanted to put a 4 digit year many people print day() + "/" + mon() + "/19" + year() After 2000 came round, many sites would claim the year was 19100, I still saw these sites until well into the late 00s However some people wrote print day() + "/" + mon() + "/" + (1900 + year()) Which would give the correct display. Changing year() from returning a 2 digit (which in the 80s and even in the 90s was often preferable) to 4 digits would be a breaking change. Changing it to being "the last two digits" rather than "number of years since 1900" would be a breaking change. That's not something that people like to do, hence things like "getFullYear" to return a 4 digit year (or 3 digit for <1000 etc)