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> ordering the numbers based on the size of units makes things easier and more useful How does it make it easier and more useful?
by jklinger410 3y ago
> ordering the numbers based on the size of units makes things easier and more useful
How does it make it easier and more useful?
- pseudalopex 3y agoBig endian ordering reduces sorting by date to sorting by number. But not big endian parts in little endian order.
- Timon3 3y agoApart from sorting advantages it makes the format less confusing, since it's just about remembering ascending/descending vs. three individual positions. If I see a DD-MM-YYYY date or YYYY-MM-DD I know which one it has to be. If I see MM-DD-YYYY I have to be told, or I will misunderstand as long as the date is ambiguous.
- jklinger410 3y agoThank you for this comment and many others in this thread. I feel I've been converted to the YYYY-MM-DD structure. Because it's in order of specificity. It feels like it saves time and potentially compute. However, I think a big problem with this is the way people say dates colloquially. Such as, March 24th 2019. Or even the 24th of March, 2019. I can't imagine saying to someone, oh can you come over to my party, it's 2024 September 5th. In many ways digital is designed to be a facsimile of analog. So sometimes what "makes sense" to people hyper fixated on the topic are simply not amenable to real society.
- Timon3 3y agoSo that's where DD-MM-YYYY comes in. In my language people always say dates in that order, and even when taking English I'll refer to "the 24th of March 2019". YYYY-MM-DD is, strangely enough, kind of just "a bunch of numbers" to me. If someone tells me a date in that format it'll take a second to realise it's a date. But for digital storage it's highly useful! I'm fine switching between the two formats based on the situation. The length of the year specifier makes this unambiguous.