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May 16th
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2025
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I hold unequivocally that 2SEPT2025 is the best dating format: the units are in order from small to big, and the use of letters for month both break up the reading for a more concrete understanding and also make it unambiguous.
Edit: folks big on computerizing this shit. My bad. I find this to be optimal for human use.
Natural numbers work backwards, units are in order from big to small. That also does not store well on databases or Excel. You can't sort it as text. YYYY-MM-DD-hh-mm
Actually, the date and time format is: yyyy-MM-dd-HH-mm. Always 12 characters, can be sorted as text or long (if the - is removed).
As long as it's easy to manipulate at the back end. IBM DB2 date/time format uses 25 characters, and includes 6 decimal places for the seconds.
Or the DB2 date (only) format which is 7 characters: CYYMMDD
C = 1 if year is greater than 1999 as a "fix" for Y2K problems. 1250902 is today's date. 250902 was exactly 100 years ago.
Yeah, that's what I'm dealing with these days...sigh. It won't be a problem for a while. Hopefully the AI of the future is trained for the edge case.
Here's atip that might help: Add 19,000,000 to any CYYMMDD date to convert it into YYYYMMDD
I will flex this knowledge at work. Thanks.
Except for all the languages that might have a different spelling for the months..
Cool. Now have it sort by date in a column with simple alphanumeric ordering.
Why is it important that they're listed small to big? How does that help?
For the same reason it matters that we’ve agreed on a particular order to the alphabet.
Ok, but if you use YYYY-MM-DD, you can sort alphabetically, and it will also sort chronologically.
Even in human use, – in nearly any given scenario – I care about the month far beyond and above before I ever care about the day; just knowing the day, without knowing the month, is useless to me while I may want to know about the month regardless the day.