this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2026
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How the fuck did anon post from the future though?
That’s not the future it’s 26th March 2001.
Just America's stupid date format.
USians. The rest of America uses metric and normal dates
Fair point.
mm/dd/yy is a crime akin to min:sec:hour
There is min:sec:hour? I feel incredibly fortunate to have never interacted with it.
I think I heard the whoosh.
It makes sense with spoken English. You say March 3rd not 3rd March. You could say 3rd of March, but it's a bit uncommon
I get the increased efficiency of ddmmyy in a number based format, but it's not hard to see how it evolved the other way from the language
But why do US-Americans say March 3rd? The British don’t. They prefer 3rd of March. And the USA loves their 4th of july…
You are right we do still say 4th of July, but usually we tend to just prefer a different format when talking about everyday things. I'm going to visit on July 15th, I have an appointment May 12th, etc. This is much more natural in American English. Saying the "12th of May" just sounds overly formal. Which is fine for a holiday, but not everyday speech.
So I guess the question is when did this shift between American and British English occur in relation to the creation of our dating formats.
I assume, like most things English, Americans kept the language more or less the same while the Brits shifted how they use the language. The European languages that are spoken in the Americas haven't changed much since colonization while the Europeans have been changing their languages drastically in the past 4 centuries
Yea makes total sense - so you'd go for the logical yyyy-mm-dd format then, to fit with how you speak the date? Right? 😅
I've never met an American English speaker that says today is 2026 March 3rd. They would say today is March 3rd 2026. If the year is included at all, usually it isn't and is understood.
I've been using yyyymmdd and was appalled when I found out the ones appaled by the American method uses ddmmyyyy. It doesn't even sort chronologicaly in alpha numeric ordering. Just why???
Edit: I just realized that ddmmyyyy looks like dummy and that's how I'm going to refer to it from now on.
They don’t use ddmmyyyy, but mmddyyyy
It's worse, the American standard is mm/dd/yyyy.
I go by yyyy/dd-mm:ww because I'm special
Oh boy, never look up big / little endian in computers
Yeah, I seem to remember that architecture code is done little endian, and the network stack is big endian. Then there is bi-endian, which I have no clue how that works.
When naming files that need to be alphanumerically sorted, yyyymmdd it’s absolutely what anyone I know will use. But in writing or language, mmddyyyy is the way to go. You start with the most gradual denominator, since it’s the most important and you sometimes skip the larger ones because they can be evident
So, the year. YYYY-MM-dd.
So, skip the month: dd-MM-YYYY.
There's no scenario in which MM-dd-YYYY makes more sense. Unless you're expecting to communicate with someone with heavy brain damage who cannot retain information for 0.2 seconds, I guess?
I'd much rather have consistency. If yyyymmdd is the best solution for file names, it's the best across the board.
How do you say it though? „It’s the 2026 March 12“?
Writing and speech don't need to be the same. You can say "March 12th, 2026" while writing it as either (all numbers) 2026-03-12 or (as spoken) "March 12, 2026". Just like you might write "$100", even though you'd never say "dollars one hundred"
Here in the states we use short hand usually. So your date would just be stated as, "March 12th". Long format would start off as, "in the year 2026 AD/CE..." which is usually done in things like proclamations by local governments for naming a specific day in someone's honor.
For previous and current dates, people definitely use mmddyyyy and I don't like it. I would much prefer to use something along the line of star-dates from star trek time expressed in years only: 2026.19178 (March 12 00:00). This fixes the need for leap years/days/seconds in calendars and instead dates become accurate.