KITCHENER – Local man Dalton Strickland, whose data entry job regularly requires him to read dates off a form and put them into a computer, literally never knows which date is the day and which is the month unless the day is above 12. “Are we using the American MM-DD-YYYY system or the rest of […]
Because he didn't know about ISO8601. The only correct date format, especially in Canada.
ISO8601 is great and all, but even without a common standard, I feel it should either be largest to smallest unit, or smallest to largest. YMD or DMY. Anything else is just asking for misunderstandings.
Leaving aside the problem that you are choosing a date system depending on who is using the dating system and for what purpose, under that condition the most logical would be MM/DD/YYYY, which is truly terrible, so I'm going to politely ignore your argument.
I'm not disagreeing in general, but I need to point out that this is like saying you should write Arabic numerals in order of decreasing powers of 10 because it autosorts on a computer.
It's the reverse. Computers automatically sort Arabic numerals and dates written in decreasing powers because those are the correct formats.
I think the user you replied to is still more correct. I think best explained in an example let's say you have a system that generates reports and it creates them with the date being the title.
If you use dmy, you would have 01/01/2024 (January 1st) report right beside 01/02/2024 (February 1st) report.
But if you use ymd you would have 2024-01-01 beside 2024-01-02.
Numerically the second option is much cleaner and easier to handle initially.