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Issue: there are 27 different ways of writing a date.
Engineers: We most make a common standard that is unambiguous, easy to understand and can replace all of these.
Issue: there are 28 different ways of writing a date.
Joke aside, I really think the iso standard for dates is the superior one!
I feel like YYYYMMDD (without dashes) might be a format in ISO 8601, but I'm fully expecting to be corrected soon. But I didn't say think, I said feel. YYYYMMDD has a similar vibe to YYYY-MM-DD, ya feel me?
Nope, you are correct! From the Wikipedia page, which cites the standards document:
- Representations can be done in one of two formats – a basic format with a minimal number of separators or an extended formatwith separators added to enhance human readability. The standard notes that "The basic format should be avoided in plain text." The separator used between date values (year, month, week, and day) is the hyphen, while the colon is used as the separator between time values (hours, minutes, and seconds). For example, the 6th day of the 1st month of the year 2009 may be written as "2009-01-06" in the extended format or as "20090106" in the basic format without ambiguity.
I agree with the ISO approach, but unfortunately without mainstream adoption in a majority of countries it's just another standard.
Until microsoft makes that the default down in the lower right corner, I don't think we'll make much headway. I've been trying to get my office to do their dated files in YYYYMMDDHHMM for years. I do mine that way but I can't get anybody else to comply. This meme lists that as a discouraged format, I guess the dashes are ISO but I don't care about the dashes. I would accept doing YYYY-MM-DD over MMDDYYYY any time though.
The dashes make it far easier for regular humans.
ISO 8601 recommends inserting a T between the calendar date portion and the time of day portion. So: 20250501T2210+00.
Upset we didn't get a "Half a score, two years, two months, and four days ago..."
Amen. Shout it from the rooftops!
I work at a global company an in my team there are people from 5 continents. we use 27-Feb-23. It's the only way nobody gets confused and it's only 1 char more. (Tbf nobody would be confused only my boss that is american lol)
This is the way.
In the last company I work for, the department was created from zero, and my boss just let me take all the technical decisions so from the begging everything was wrote in ISO-8601. When I left it was just the way it was, if you try to use any other date format anywhere something is going to give you an error.
10:13 PM on February 27th, but how do you write the year?
So, assuming you got the time wrong and meant you could confuse year and time of day, ISO also puts time after date.
2025-05-01T18:18:03Z
Which makes sense. Higher unit to lower unit.
That format near the cat's tail should have used hue to differentiate year/month/day...
