ITT: people saying one thing is better than any other without thinking of context.
If I want to know today's date ISO 8601 isn't a good answer. And if I put stuff in folders by date then DD-MM-YYYY is a real bad way to do it.
But MM-DD-YYYY is the worst one no matter the context.
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I like YYYY-MM-DD because then I don't have to figure out half the time if they used MM-DD-YYYY or if they were sane.
If I want to know today's date ISO 8601 isn't a good answer
Can be tailed to the relevant bit though.
DD(First 3 of Month, All Caps)YYYY examples: 01JAN2026, 24MAR1987,20DEC3065
This is how I had to write dates when I worked for a cGMP pharma manufacturing facility and did controlled paperwork. The idea was it was it was impossible for any mistakes when reading the date, only the days were 2 digits, the month was letters, and the year was 4 digits.
Basically all of the validated SOPs were written so that anyone could pick up the paperwork and execute the instructions, and the inverse had to be true as well anyone picking up a completed SOP should be able to read and follow everything written down, and literally every step in the process required initials and date it was executed.
Fun fact, if you fucked up and wrote something wrong or illegibly you were punished twice, once because you had to strike out the mistake, initial date the strikeout and write correctly the next time, and the second was when you get stink eyed by the QA people who have to review all the paperwork before it's scanned and logged back into documentum.
Months are stupid anyway, lets drop them and swap for what they were supposed to represent instead: the moon phase, so today would be 216-2026-Waning Gibbous
1785793853 seconds since Linux epoch
ISO 8601
As for why it's better:
- It's in sort order. Even if you use it for things that don't understand dates, they sort properly because the day is the last part, month is the middle part, and year is the first part. If you include hours, minutes or seconds, the sort order is still preserved.
- Speaking of things that don't understand dates, because there are no slashes, you can easily use it in file names, directories, and anything else that treats slash as a special character. In addition, if you include the time part, because it uses "T" to separate the date and time, it doesn't use a space, so once again it can be easily used anywhere where a space might cause issues.
To be fair, the time separators don't behave well on all implementations of filesystem access by filename. Need to use underscores or omit them at times.
💯
This is the way.
This is the way.
I read this meme and was physically revolted and wanted to immediately down vote. Great job.
The superior date format is, of course, ISO 8601. YYYY-MM-DD.
RFC3339 is better than ISO8601 since it doesn't allow some of the esoteric formats, and allows some useful formats that ISO8601 doesn't (like separating date and time by a space instead of by T)
For example, 2026-W32-1 is also a valid ISO8601 date: Monday on the 32nd week of 2026. That format isn't allowed with RFC3339.
yyyy/mm/dd, it's less ambiguous and it sorts nicely
Edit: so many replies suggesting using a hyphen as a separator, I'd like to compromise by using the oblique angle sign (⦧) which looks like a slash that becomes a hyphen in the middle. yyyy⦧mm⦧dd
Beat me to it, except I’d do yyyy-mm-dd because some OSes throw fits about having slashes in file names. Way better than the “Group Project-final FINAL v3 PAUL USE THIS ONE.file” versioning system that people seem to use.
HISSSSSS.
switch the slashes to dashes
[Angry ISO-8601 noises]
53 comments and I'm the first effusive nerd to bring up unix epoch? Nothing happened before 0 (1970-01-01 00:00:00) anyway.
Epoch is signed though, that 1970 date is the midpoint
~~ISO 8601~~ RFC 3339 (yyyy-mm-dd) for storing dates in software. Any format that that goes in the order of day, month, and year for conversational/presentational purposes, preferable the format is dynamic depending on the user's locale (even for those that want the month first). There now everyone is happy.
Edit: switched to RFC 3339 since it is a subset of ISO 8601 that is more strict, and I love semantics.
Anyone who wants to write the millennium between the month and century loses all credibility when arguing about date formats.
YYYY-MM-DD is the only coherent date format.