• Aceticon@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    You’re confusing your own familiarity and experience with a general human rule.

    My mother tongue (Portuguese) has the same order when saying numbers as English (i.e. twenty seven) and indeed when I learned Dutch it was jarring that their number order is the reverse (i.e. seven and twenty) until I got used to it, by which point it stopped being jarring.

    The brain doesn’t really care beyond “this is not how I’m used to parse numbers” and once you get used to do it that way, it works just as well.

    As for dates, people using year first is jarring to me, because I grew up hearing day first then month, then year. There is only one advantage for year first, which is very specifically when in text form, sorting by text dates written in year-month-day by alphabetical order will correctly sort by date, which is nice if you’re a programmer (and the reason why when I need to have a date as part of a filename I’ll user year first). Meanwhile the advantage of day first is that often you don’t need to say the rest since if you don’t it’s implied as the present one (i.e. if I tell you now “let’s have that meeting on the 10th” June and 2024 are implied) so you can convey the same infomation with less words (however in written form meant to preserve the date for future reference you have to write the whole thing anyway)

    Personally I recognize that it’s mainly familiarity that makes me favour one format over the other and logically I don’t think one way is overall better than the other one as the advantages of each are situational.

    • bitwaba@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Meanwhile the advantage of day first is that often you don’t need to say the rest since if you don’t it’s implied as the present one (i.e. if I tell you now “let’s have that meeting on the 10th” June and 2024 are implied) so you can convey the same infomation with less words (however in written form meant to preserve the date for future reference you have to write the whole thing anyway)

      That advantage is not exclusive to the date-first system. You can still leave out implied information with month-first as well.

      Personally I recognize that it’s mainly familiarity that makes me favour one format over the other and logically I don’t think one way is overall better than the other one as the advantages of each are situational.

      This is the biggest part of it. No one wants to change what they know. I’m from the US and moved to the UK, and interact with continental Europeans on a daily basis. I’ve seen and used both systems day to day. But when I approach this question, my answer isn’t “this one is better because that’s the one I like or I’m most comfortable with”, my answer is “if no one knew any system right now, and we all had to choose between one of the two options, which one is the more sensible option?”

      dd-mm-yyyy has no benefit over yyyy-mm-dd, while yyyy-mm-dd does have benefits over dd-mm-yyyy. The choice is easy.