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thu posted: Thu 2022-04-28 13:53:09 tags: n/a
TIL (relearned?) that the date formats with month first, day second, and year last are almost exclusively used in the US. (E.g. 04/28/2022 ; 04/28/22 ; 4-28-22 ; etc.) If you think about the order of unit significance, where a year is a more significant than a month and a month is more significant than a day, then it makes sense to order elements either as Y-M-D (most-to-least significant) or D-M-Y (least-to-most significant). Our peculiar American M-D-Y is as nonsensical as M-Y-D. How weird and silly does "04/2022/28" look? Yeah, exactly. And for dates where the day is 12 or less, it causes no end of confusion for non-Americans.

When you think about how computers sort information alphabetically, the supremacy of most-to-least-significant ordering (i.e. Y-M-D formats) becomes obvious. If you have files corresponding to dates, as so often happens in business, then you get a clean sort in date order if the date elements are ordered Y-M-D. And this is why YYYY-MM-DD format is an international standard: ISO 8601.

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Just over 4 years into my tenure with the AMC, they downsized me. Leaving a lot of loose ends, but if they would rather schlump along on manual processes then God bless 'em and God bless me.