date formats (was Re: Single Point of Weakness is in the Works.Thank you Major Tom.)

[Thomas Shaddack]

> I've always preferred YYYY.MM.DD, this way you can sort things very
> easily.  If you write the names of the months, it doesn't translate well
> to other languages, though it may be similar, *AND* more importantly from
> a geek perspective, if you do a sort, April shows as the 1st month of the
> year, before January - not good.

All depends on what you want. YYYY-MM-DD (or variations, including YYMMDD)
are good when there is a chance it could be needed to be sorted.

> If you do the reverse DD.MM.YYYY you can't sort it either since the 1st
> day of every month shows up 1st.  Dumb.  Friendly to non-geeks, but dumb.

However, not all data are to be sorted. There are some applications where
friendliness to non-geeks is more important than sortability (eg, when
showing only one value anyway). Sometimes we have to sacrifice something
to the users to get them out of our hair.

> The worst annoyance I've seen is using Unix time as a timestamp on log
> dates.  It's the most unreadable of all formats.  Sorts nicely though, but
> what a bitch to read.  (Unix time being the number of seconds in decimal
> since 1/1/1970.)

The logs are usually intended to be human-readable. However, as long as it
is reasonably trivial to write a program to process the timestamps, it's
merely annoying.