this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2023
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[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

The first and the last date format are terrible because you can confuse the day of the month with the number of the month.

I only like date formats where it's not possible to confuse any field, like 8 Aug 2023. I minimize ambiguity.

If the date is in a file name, I make an exception using 2023-08-09 such that a string sort is equal to a date sort.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

For actually displaying dates to others, I agree that spelling out the month is absolutely preferred. But if space is limited, you're somewhat required to pick a very shortened format, and the US version is dumb, even if that's what you should use when displaying in that locale.

But for working with dates on computers, year-month-day works great, because it's still human readable, is naturally sortable, and makes it easier for serialization.

The first one is conventionally never year-day-month, and if anyone ever sent me a date of 2023-17-08, I would respond with, "What the hell?! Are you being evil on purpose?"