alt Hacker News> I also wish that the world would settle on a sane date-time format like the ISO 8601
IIRC, in most countries the native format is D-M-Y (with varying separators), but some Asian countries use Y-M-D. Since those formats are easy to distinguish, that's no problem. That's why Y-M-D is spreading in Europe for official or technical documents.
There's mainly one country which messes things up...
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8601, when used fully according to spec sucks. It makes today 20250902. It doesn't have seperators. And for adding a time it gets even less readable.
Its a serialization and machine communication format. And that makes me sad. Because YYYY-MM-DD is a great format, without a good name.
YMD has caught on, I think, because it allows for the numbers to be "in order" (not mixed-endian) while still having the month before the day which matches the practice for speaking dates in (at least) the US and Canada.
I always like the compromise of the M/D/M system popularised by the British documentary series Look Around You, e.g. "January the fourth of March".
I live in that country, and I am constantly messing up date forms. My brain always goes yyyy-mm-dd. If I write it out, September 1st, 2025, I get it in the “right” order. But otherwise, especially if I’m tired, it’s always in a sortable format.
YYYY-MM-DD is also the official date format in Canada, though it's not officially enforced, so outside of government documents you end up seeing a bit of all three formats all over the place. I've always used ISO 8601 and no one bats an eye, and it's convenient since YYYY-DD-MM isn't really a thing, so it can't be confused for anything else, unlike the other two formats.