Year-Month-Day best everywhere
Facts. The sorting system for files inevitably makes YYYY-MM-DD more optimal. I tried to resist but it doesn’t work.
To the commenters justifying the written form MM-DD-YYYY on the basis of preferring to say the name of the month followed by the day (which the written numerical sequence does not preclude you from doing). If someone were to say something like “the time is a quarter to eleven” do you think they would have a case for writing it 45:10? And if so, how would you deal with the ambiguity of “ten past ten” if they wrote it 10:10 instead of 10:10?
ISO dates are the goat because they string compare correctly. Just yesterday I shaved 2 full seconds off a page transition by removing a date parse in the middle of a hot sorting loop. Everything should use ISO in my opinion.
Maybe we should form some sort of organization, on an international stage, dedicated to creating and maintaining such standards.
I’m definitely in the “for almost everything” camp. It’s less ambiguous especially when you consider the DD/MM vs MM/DD nonsense between US dates vs elsewhere. Pretty much the only time I don’t use ISO-8601 is when I’m using non-numeric month names like when saying a date out loud.
There are two ways of writting dates: the “yyyy-mm-dd” one and the wrong one