Date notation preferences

by Karel Thönissen

In the thread on Joel on Software that I mentioned yesterday, David B.Wildgoose wrote about my date notation preference:

Other than that, yes, let's standardise on YYYY.MM.DD for dates

An anonymous then replied:

On the contrary, the reverse is better for every day use. I probably do not really want to know the year a letter was written, for example, I am more likely to be interested in the day and then the month. By all means use the reverse format internally if that is what makes life easier but people in the West generally read left to right.

My reply:

The major-minor order is used in our company for everything, not just dates. Version numbers, times, file paths, people's names, project monikers, paragraph numbering, telephone numbers, addresses, file names, etc. We have a few simple rules that are easy to memorise and that take the variance out of much of our decisions. Call it an example of knowledge management.

Another benefit of this order is that it allows for designating other periods than just days. With the same syntactic device we handle weeks, months, quarters, and times. This is possible in a way that is still easy to read and that allows mechanic parsing and sorting.

The left to right argument is not that strong, because scientific research tells us that people scan text with many different strategies. The human eye and human mind are capable enough to handle things like this.

Thönissen Károly wagyok! (in improved Hungarian notation 8-)

thoenissen.karel

and: 

I should have added that my notation also works when used in file names, although it is wise to leave out any form of punctuation.  All my files have names like these:

20040324 mother letter to.txt

This keeps the files sorted on any platform in any view.

As a matter of fact, in our case this is not a preference, it is the only correct notation. Our company motto is 'Simple. Powerful. Robust.'. Now this is an example of simplicity. There are no preferences.