Unironically yes, because it makes it easy to sort by date.
When you sort by name, the year will get sorted first, then the month, then the day. So it’ll sort like this:
2021-05-19
2021-07-23
2023–06-20
Notice that everything is sorted chronologically. But if you do MM-DD-YYYY then you get this instead:
05-19-2021
06-20-2023
07-23-2021
Notice that the 2023 date is between the two 2021 dates. This is even worse if you do DD-MM-YYYY, because now the first number is changing constantly. It may not be a problem with only three dates, but imagine a spreadsheet with 2000+ entries, or a folder with dozens of files archived by date, to allow for potential rollbacks, versioning, etc…
There’s a reason ISO standards for timestamps list things big to small: YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss in that specific order every time.
Always write largest to smallest. That way it can be sorted easily starting with the year, then month, then day.
Or as computer people say, big-endian.
Computer ponies say it too
We should all just write it in ISO 8601
Largest to smallest? So should I write December 02, 2024 as 2024/12/02? And then February 12, 2024 as 2024/12/02?
/s
Unironically yes, because it makes it easy to sort by date.
When you sort by name, the year will get sorted first, then the month, then the day. So it’ll sort like this:
Notice that everything is sorted chronologically. But if you do MM-DD-YYYY then you get this instead:
Notice that the 2023 date is between the two 2021 dates. This is even worse if you do DD-MM-YYYY, because now the first number is changing constantly. It may not be a problem with only three dates, but imagine a spreadsheet with 2000+ entries, or a folder with dozens of files archived by date, to allow for potential rollbacks, versioning, etc…
There’s a reason ISO standards for timestamps list things big to small: YYYY-MM-DD hh:mm:ss in that specific order every time.
You misread. The second part sorts 12 before Feb because 12 > 02, making both dates identical.
What if I want to easily sort the day or month?