Not perfect, but it’s easy to recognise the year in 01/31/32
The year has never been the problem.
Now, if there are plans to rename the months Thirtyseconduary, Fortyfirstember and so on, we might be getting somewhere.
YY/MM/DD works the best because it puts the least significant number at the end. This is how we iterate all other numbers (small number at the end).
Don’t disagree here, but in the wild you sometimes encounter one of those and it’s just nice that it’s going to be slightly less painful
To sort a folder on a computer I agree, but to socialise, both me and my friends plan happenings down to the days they are happening, not months or years, so there the opposite is true.
I always wrote the year with four digits, even back in the 90s. So even if I write the date as 2026-01-31 (I do it for files) or 31/01/2026 (everyday), it’s completely unambiguous.
The actual problem is the internet, because Americans use that weird MM/DD/YYYY convention. To avoid confusion for those I often abbreviate the month instead of numbering it; e.g. 01/Jan/2026.
Isn’t the year always at the end anyway?
YYYY-MM-DD is the best format, please don’t change my mind :)
This one sorts correctly in the computer.
I love a good, lexically sortable date format.
I prefer 31JAN2026 myself. No ambiguity, readable internationally.
Doesn’t sort well on file systems, where it is usually best to sort first by year, then month and day.
Internationally where English is understood
yes, good for structuring your file folders too
…/documents/2026/01/15/ and …/documents/2026/01/16/ is not only easier to read but also navigate
Nope, some absolute madlads use
YY/MM/DD
Which was really fun when you get something like 12/03/11I propose YM/DM/YD
At my job I have to use this “SAP” software and I think it’s the worst professional software I’ve ever used. The dates export as three pairs of two digits. No indication of what’s what. The numbers export with commas, so like “1234” comes out in the csv as “1,234”. I hate it. It also mangles some other data so like “0000” turns into “” for some reason.
Oh wow. How is that not workflow destroyingly bad? Hopefully it doesn’t generate filenames with that format
It is! I spent a lot of time manually cleaning up the CSV, and there were still problems.
Apparently there’s some other way to export data that’s not horrible but I’m not authorized to use it for some reason.
I work at a big company with very weak testing culture.
I always do it at the start. So I can sort by name. And it will be sorted by date
Not only that, it goes in order of importance
It’s more important to know that something happened in 2026 than what month
It’s more important to know that it happened in January than which particular day
I am fully aware that at least two of the planet’s almost 200 countries write dates that way, but for most people, this is a solution to a nonexistent problem.
