ISO 8601
As for why it’s better:
- It’s in sort order. Even if you use it for things that don’t understand dates, they sort properly because the day is the last part, month is the middle part, and year is the first part. If you include hours, minutes or seconds, the sort order is still preserved.
- Speaking of things that don’t understand dates, because there are no slashes, you can easily use it in file names, directories, and anything else that treats slash as a special character. In addition, if you include the time part, because it uses “T” to separate the date and time, it doesn’t use a space, so once again it can be easily used anywhere where a space might cause issues.
To be fair, the time separators don’t behave well on all implementations of filesystem access by filename. Need to use underscores or omit them at times.
This is the way.
This is the way.
This is the (year-month-) day.
RFC 3339
ISO would be great, but sadly OmegaStar doesn’t support ISO timestamps yet.
Wtf is an omega star?
A Warrior Cats and Omegaverse crossover character
What’s a warrior cat
Not shit enough for a shitpost.
It’s great, and standard for software. But do any of y’all communicate dates like this in your personal life?
Like “want to go to a hockey game with me 2026-10-17?” As cursed as mm-dd-yy is, it feels a lot more natural in conversation.
Say when is that independence day of yours?
There is nothing ‘natural’ about mm/dd/yy, it is just what you are used to - end of story.
I knew I would eat shit for that comment.
July 4th is a funny example cause you can say “the 4th” and everyone knows what you mean, but people also say “4th of July” to give it more importance.
That’s a lot less common for other dates, Americans aren’t commonly saying “25th of December”.
I always feel like rolling my eyes whilst Americans slowly drawl the month at me before telling me the day of the month I wanted
“Dec…”
Oh god, you’re American
“…em…”
Here we go, we’re going for it
“…berrrrr”
Yes, we’re getting there
“…rrrrrrr”
Hopefully we get to the date, or I’m going to have to ask someone else
[inhales]
Why did it have to be an American
“Twenty….”
Please not the year
“…-seventh”
Hallelujah, thank the lord, we have a date. Oh Jesus, why such an ordeal. So much time for stupid intrusive thoughts. What was it again…?
Admittedly like most of this is my failings as a person
Ok, let me rephrase that: See how 4th of July feels natural for you to say or hear?
That’s because you’re used to it.
That’s how it is for the rest of us using DD-MM-YYYY, but for all dates.
Because that’s what we are used to. And yes we use it in everyday life and in every conversation.
That is all there is to it.
What you are used to inevitably becomes more natural for you subjectively…
I absolutely fill out dates in iso 8601 any time I’m required to sign a form.
I like your style. I’ll start doing that, (unless a format is specified, because I’m no protocol breaker.)
same. even if they give a different format, because fuck that I’m not thinking about what arbitrary format you want me to use, I see a date field and I’m filling it out with the proper date format
Yes, kind of.
I shorthand it verbally unless I’m giving a full date, but typed, it’s almost always yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss (whichever part of that is relevant).
I do this because I believe it’s the most logical, it sorts properly without having to use a datetime library, and it can’t be confused with another system (is 12-1-2026 in the future or the past? No way to know just by looking at it).
Just shortening it to MM-dd could cause confusion with anyone not in the US so I’ll typically include the year as well (also useful if I wind up having to look at old notes or emails to not have to figure out the year I meant … Which has happened more than once …)
Only a truly insane person would use mm-dd-yy in conversation. “Want to go to a hockey game with me ten seventeen twenty-six?” Or worse, “…oh four oh seven twenty-seven.” Pure madness.
Conversationally, mmm d yy or d mmm yy (usually just shortened to mmm d or d mmm) is where it’s at.
yes, I’ll send dates as mm-dd in my personal life as well. only when discussing exact dates for scheduling things, otherwise in conversational messaging it’s mmmm dd
like if we’re talking about when we want to go do x activity, I’ll propose August 8th. but if we’re scheduling trip dates, it’s 08-08 through 09-12
I spell out the month, but I’m fancy
I read this meme and was physically revolted and wanted to immediately down vote. Great job.
The superior date format is, of course, ISO 8601. YYYY-MM-DD.
yyyy/mm/dd, it’s less ambiguous and it sorts nicely
Edit: so many replies suggesting using a hyphen as a separator, I’d like to compromise by using the oblique angle sign (⦧) which looks like a slash that becomes a hyphen in the middle. yyyy⦧mm⦧dd
nerd detected
HISSSSSS.
switch the slashes to dashes
[Angry ISO-8601 noises]
Ew.
yyyymmdd
Tis the Canadian way.
I feel like DD/MM/YYYY is the same as doing: ss:mm:HH and I find that confusing.
That’s really funny. DMY is more like Hms in that it is in descending order of relevance. Most people asking the date or time are looking for the hour of the day or the day of the month, and the rest is context.
Files get sorted by alphanumerical order so ISO 8601 (YYYY-MM-DD) is objectively superior in that regard.
My comment was about vocal human interaction, not on a device.
I agree with that in principle, but a) it should be in meta data and b) it should be abstracted so the user can display any format they wish. As a last resort, in the file name, sure. That standard adds a lot of extra time gumpf
I see the duality in this but I still think both are valid. When telling the time, there’s usually no point in including the seconds since they’ll have changed before you finish saying the whole thing anyway. In spoken word IMO it makes sense to go from more specific to less specific, and even not include extra parts sometimes (e. g. “today is the 3rd” when it’s expected to know the month and, well, year from context, or “it’s half past” to someone whom you’ve told the time a couple of minutes ago).
YYYYMMDDHHMMSS
But you’ll end up with months instead of minutes!
other formats are confusing
Good luck sorting anything by date!
Date format has nothing to do with sorting by date.
ISO 8601RFC 3339 (yyyy-mm-dd) for storing dates in software. Any format that that goes in the order of day, month, and year for conversational/presentational purposes, preferable the format is dynamic depending on the user’s locale (even for those that want the month first). There now everyone is happy.Edit: switched to RFC 3339 since it is a subset of ISO 8601 that is more strict, and I love semantics.
Anyone who wants to write the millennium between the month and century loses all credibility when arguing about date formats.
YYYY-MM-DD is the only coherent date format.
It’s not a bad idea to write it 6202 but then we’re redoing all the numbers, and that’s going to take time
Im more of a Medjool guy myself. Not sure what everyone else is talking about.
April 25th.
We’ve already established this.
Because it’s not too hot and not too cold. All you need is a light jacket.
FYI that’s about 218°C
YYYYYMMDD
I prefer to think we’re in the year 12026, since homo sapiens really got things going around 10,000 BCE.
Every fucking time they make him look like a tool.
He formats dates, how else would he look like?
4/Aug/2026
Already saw 1 person write 4/7/26. Writing that 3-4 letters for the month both solves the day/month vs month/day issue, and the off chance someone makes mistake of the month number
Yeah, this is how I do it. Computers are more than capable of handling the three-letter abbreviation for months nowadays, versus some bygone era where perhaps we needed just numbers. This is how I date anything that I need to out a date on.
