American dates

[Captain Caveman]

Because screw what the rest of the world does.

Unless it's the French to help you.

 

[whitehall]

Maybe kids who actually were born yesterday don't recognize tradition when it stares them in the face. We do certain things because they worked in the past and we are reluctant to change just because kids who were raised on vids don't understand the system.

 

[Unkotare]

Unless it's the French to help you.

The French were not interested in helping us, they were interested in hurting the Brits.

 

[Captain Caveman]

Date Format in the United States | ISO

iso.mit.edu

One of the hypotheses is that the United States borrowed the way it was written from the United Kingdom who used it before the 20th century and then later changed it to match Europe (dd-mm-yyyy). American colonists liked their original format and it’s been that way ever since.

Ah yes, been doing a spot of Googling when I got the chance and the answer in your post was one of a few theories. Apparently, there's no exact answer.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

Why does America go buy Month, Day, Year?

What I mean is, normally figures go in size order. So you weigh 12st 10lbs and 3oz's. The time is 9 hours, 56 minutes and 33 seconds. The distance to the shops is 12 miles, 23 yards and one foot.

Dave is 32 years, 6 months and 3 days old.

In order, a day is shorter than a month and a month is shorter than a year. So today is the 25th August 2022, or, 25/8/22. So why 8/25/22? Why the fuck up?

You are not 6 months, 32 years and 3 days old.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

Why does America go buy Month, Day, Year?

What I mean is, normally figures go in size order. So you weigh 12st 10lbs and 3oz's. The time is 9 hours, 56 minutes and 33 seconds. The distance to the shops is 12 miles, 23 yards and one foot.

Dave is 32 years, 6 months and 3 days old.

In order, a day is shorter than a month and a month is shorter than a year. So today is the 25th August 2022, or, 25/8/22. So why 8/25/22? Why the fuck up?

You are not 6 months, 32 years and 3 days old.

I nearly always write any date using a form in which the name of the month is spelled out; simply because otherwise, the use for numbers only gets ambiguous.

Would 04/06/12 be April sixth, 2012, June fourth, 2012, December fourth, 2006, or December sixth, 2004?

Using the full year helps greatly as far as eliminating that ambiguity, as well as eliminating the 2000-bug issue. You can know that 2016 refers to the year 2016, and not 1916, 2116, or any other year; and you also know that it cannot be a month or a day-of-month.

But if I write the date as 06 April 2012, then you know exactly what date I am referring to, and you do not need to try to guess whether I was using the month/day numbers in the American or European style.

If all numbers are to be used, then I think the only rational order is yyyy mm dd. 2012 04 06. In fact, that's a convention that I often use in naming files, to indicate in the filename the date represented by the contents of that file.