[capableweb]

Impossible, what madman would use a date-format that goes $MONTH.$DAY.$YEAR that basically have a random order instead of $DAY.$MONTH.$YEAR or $YEAR.$MONTH.$DAY? No one would be that crazy, it's too ambiguous to be useful.

It's clearly intended to be 5th of October, 2023.

(This may or may not be sarcasm, in case people may not or may misunderstand)

[dingledork69]

I'm not american, but they always seem to do month.day.year for some bizarre reason

[reaperducer]

I'm not american, but they always seem to do month.day.year for some bizarre reason

It's one of those things that America inherited from England, and then when England changed its method, the Americans saw no need to change because it wasn't part of England anymore.†

If you go into antiques stores in England, you will find that with items that are engraved, the older it is, the more likely it will have the now-American date format.

There was an item on Antiques Roadshow a couple of months ago that was a gift from Queen Victoria to someone that had an engraving that included the American date format.

† This is true for a surprising number of minor differences between America and England. In life, it's often better to understand the history of things, rather than just ignorantly write off a group of people as bizarre.

[miroljub]

I thought the Americans use MM/dd/YY. As soon as I see a dot "." instead of "/" I assume a "normal" day-month order.

[dingledork69]

I wouldn't expect them to be that precise, especially when they misspell their client's name as OPENAL

[phpisthebest]

I use MM.DD.YY just to confuse people :)

[miroljub]

Why not YD.MD.YM ?

[narimiran]

WDYM?

[synalx]

It's because we write the numerals in the same order as the longer form: May 10th, 2023 becomes 5/10/23.

[mijoharas]

Not American, and maybe it's a cultural difference but in England it's much more common to say "the 10th of May".

Then again, we write our dates in a more sensible manner. I suppose it's time to link to the old sapir whorf hypothesis[0] to explain the difference.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

[kordlessagain]

Decimals proceed in order of refinement to smaller increments. Years are long, months are collections of days, and days are collections of hours, and so forth.

By that logic, all formatted dates should follow a progression of precision. This is, in fact, a standard: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601

[mijoharas]

Also agreed, and what i personally use.

[joshmanders]

> Then again, we write our dates in a more sensible manner.

yawn

Yeah we write our dates in a more sensible manner too. And also we drive on the correct side of the road and imperial units of measurement are superior.

[HNDen21]

I have been in the US for 30 years but metric is way better... all that nanometer stuff in your computer is metric not imperial as well

for example a 10cm cube filled with water weighs 1 kilo and is 1 liter, boils at 100 degrees. In the US you deal with cups pints, quarts, gallons... and you can't even convert easily between dry and liquid stuff

I do agree that steering wheels should be on the left :-)

[joshmanders]

I was being sarcastic because none is better, it's what we're used to. I can do measurements in both imperial and metric, but because imperial is widely used in MY country, I find it "superior", same with everything else.

[the-dude]

> all that nanometer stuff in your computer is metric not imperial as well

Electronics is full of imperial standards.

[taf2]

i'm aMerican and I always use year-month-day

[rhacker]

Same here but I'm also a programmer, YYYY-MM-DD

[HNDen21]

Right ISO 8601... in SQL Server it's the unambiguous format

[JohnFen]

I'm an American who agrees. YY/MM/DD is the only reasonable order.

[flangola7]

I think that's because that's how the full date is spoken. It's "September Eleventh" not "Eleventh of September". If someone said "My birthday is twenty-seventh of November" I would wonder if they're a synth.

[reitanuki]

But outside US, '11th of September' IS how it's said

[dyingkneepad]

I'm American (South American, to be more precise) and we do DD/MM/YYYY around here.

[yeputons]

Maybe that has something to do with feet and inches instead of metric.