system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: The best way to write out a date is YEAR-MONTH-DAY whether it's 2021-02-22, 2021 February 22, or any variations therein.

I feel like in English-speaking areas, there's two ways of writing dates. In the US, it's usually MONTH-DAY-YEAR and in the UK it's DAY-MONTH-YEAR. IMO, these are both silly, as they can be confusing.

For example, May 1, 2021 could be written as 05-01-2021 (US). In the UK, that could be construed as 5 January, 2021. Likewise, the opposite could happen in the US with a UK date.

If we agreed that it should be "vaguest to most specific" from left to right, then there would never be any confusion on this.

Additionally, writing dates with the year first helps when creating things like filenames. If you have a list like this, it would be incredibly difficult to organize it from oldest to newest, for example:

01-24-2021
05-08-2020
09-13-1982
...

Not to mention, that 05-08-2020 date could be confusing as described previously.

Whereas that same list with the YEAR-MONTH-DAY format could be organized very easily with no confusion:

2021-01-24
2020-05-08
1982-09-13
...

Of course, getting everyone on board with this would be tricky, as even the UK would likely feel weird writing out a date as "2021 February 22." But it would make more sense.
gpt
> If we agreed that it should be "vaguest to most specific" from left to right, then there would never be any confusion on this.

This isn't a reason for any particular format, since it applies to all of them. If we agree that it should be one format, then there won't be any confusion regardless of what format that is.

> Additionally, writing dates with the year first helps when creating things like filenames. If you have a list like this, it would be incredibly difficult to organize it from oldest to newest, for example:

Writing the year first offers no practical gains, and has practical drawbacks. The year is the least significant bit of information in the date, followed by the month, and then the date (at least, until we discover time travel). For optimal communication, you want to put the most important bit first, so that the date is understood as soon as possible.

For file names, there are no practical gains. In any situation where sorting by date is of concern, far better implementations exist than any combination of D/M/Y, just like how Unix time is so much better than any of the nomally-used time formats. You should be tailoring the sorting to your needs, not using something so half-baked.