I really hate watching historical documentaries where they spell out dates with day->month->year. If the intention is to teach, then the year is most important

I really hate watching historical documentaries where they spell out dates with day->month->year. If the intention is to teach, then the year is most important number and all other information is to be catalogued in context of broadest time period. The DD-MM-YYYY forces viewers to keep the whole date in their heads before it can be parsed and understood. The "Algorithms to Live By" book has a good name for this: computational kindness. We should strive to reduce cognitive burden. The bigger the audience, the more effort should go into making data digestible. Unfortunately the established date standard goes against it. The other problem is mixing endianness: the date information uses little endian, while numbers themselves are spelled out in big endian. The American MM-DD-YYYY on the other hand... I don't know what they were thinking.