The greatest country in the world

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It's by smallest integer to largest, what's weird about that?
12 months a year, up to 31 days a month and X number of years. It makes the most sense
- Because it gets horribly fucky when you now have to figure out if a date is actually formatted as MM-DD-YY or DD-MM-YY.
  Surely we've all handled reading an expiration date before and have wondered if we're eating something OK or has expired months ago because they chose the other format.
  (Honestly, I think both formats are shit, and the only correct way to do dates with numbers only is YYYY-MM-DD. If not, then at least use letters for months, like 30 AUG 2023)
  
  It should be ordered by significance (ideally descending). USA's date is like putting the million between the thousands and the unit.
  
  Surely we’ve all handled reading an expiration date before and have wondered if we’re eating something OK or has expired months ago
  No, I haven't, and I don't know anyone else who has
  
  Then you've never bought imported food or never got food gifts overseas. Or never travelled to a country that used the format that you don't use.
  For example, 06/09/2023 could mean either you're eating something that expires next month, or expired two months ago.
- Try to figure out a way to sort it automatically and get back to me on why it's stupid
  
  Easy. Don't store dates as a text string. That's just bad programming.
  
  When you say "don't store dates as a string" what you're really saying is "wait for someone else to solve the problem and release a library, then use that library". That seems to be what the majority of the industry does (I'm a Java coder myself and joda is a lifesaver in that regard) but my point is that this problem is hard. Date and time stamps are a subtly difficult part of the average API monkey's daily work.

164 comments