Date format, logical thinking and natural thinking

Americans write dates in this format: MM, DD, YYYY.

Brits write them this way: DD, MM, YYYY.

Sometimes you see dates in this format: YYYY, MM, DD.

From a programming / sorting perspective, the American format is the worst of the three, and I’ve seen people criticize it as being illogical. The British format goes from the smallest increment to the biggest, and the last format goes from the biggest to the smallest, but the American format goes middle, smallest, biggest.

The criticism is clearly just from that point of view, but these things don’t usually happen by accident. For some reason, MM, DD, YYYY caught on. Why?

Perhaps human brains don’t sort information the way a computer does. For example, perhaps our minds would rather know a general estimate, then a specific, then a “big picture.”

Someone might say “but don’t the Brits have brains too?” Of course they do, but I think their current date format is a new thing. If you do an image search for old British newspapers, you see the MM, DD, YYYY format.

The larger point is that accommodating computers might change the way we think in ways we don’t expect. That’s not necessarily a bad or scary thing, but it is something to keep in mind.

3 thoughts on “Date format, logical thinking and natural thinking”

  1. As a software engineer, I want users to put it in a more logical order than what we do it in normal practice. But, computers are to make our lives easier, not us to make programmers lives easier. The computer doesn’t care either way…just makes a difference to the software engineer. But, the job of the software engineer is to make it easy for the user.

    For instance, you can change your user locale settings on Windows to use whatever format you are comfortable with. The default date and time formats are supposed to pick that up…if the software is playing nice with Windows locales. Same with number formatting. For the Germans, Pi is 3,1415926… and two million is 2.000.000. Whereas for us Pi is 3.1415926… and two million is 2,000,000.

  2. Here I have a manuscript in German right before my eyes:

    “Dasein Gottes
    29. Apr. 79”

    It is the beginning of lecture notes from 1879 in Vienna.

    Most likely the British simply adapted to the Europeans in writing dates. And they have brains too!

Comments are closed.