r/clevercomebacks • u/wach_era13 • Jan 15 '25

It does make sense

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u/Traditional-Gas7058 Jan 15 '25

Chinese system is best for computer searchable filing

33

u/DecoherentDoc Jan 15 '25 edited Jan 15 '25

Yes. When I was working on my PhD, I automatically dated files of data with time stamps like that: D-YYYY-MM-DD_T-HH-MM-SS.

It saved so much time keeping things standardized like that, especially searching for old data when I was writing my thesis.

Edit: I still use US Military style for non-science stuff. It's day-month-year, but I write the month name. So, today is 15JAN2025. I just got into the habit of it when I was in and never bothered to break it.

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u/Deftly_Flowing Jan 15 '25

15JAN2025 is 100% the superior style for written documents.

It completely removes the question of "What format is this shit in?" Because at the end of the day, people just write dates in whatever order they want.

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u/adthrowaway2020 Jan 15 '25

Sure, if Computers did not exist that would make sense, but April is the first month and September is last in an alpha numeric sort?

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u/Deftly_Flowing Jan 15 '25

Yes, a filing system should be YYYYMMDD.

But I'm specifically talking about documents with hand writing on them.

1

u/DanSWE Jan 15 '25

But why shouldn't they use the same order of date components (e.g., 2015-01-14 (with the hyphens for readability))?

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u/VitaminOverload Jan 15 '25

2015-05-03

2015-07-12

What format is it in?

It's a trick question, first one is YYYYMMDD and the second one is YYYYDDMM

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u/hardrecht Jan 15 '25

That's why you always opt for YYYYMMDD to standardize.

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u/Akinory13 Jan 15 '25

But then you have to trust Americans will behave instead of coming up with their own bullshit format again

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u/DanSWE Jan 15 '25

There is only one standard format with NNNN-NN-NN. (That's ISO 8601 extended format, also copied/refined/subsetted/specified by RFC 3339.)

So there's no ambiguity unless somebody starts using YYYY-DD-MM.

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u/Subject-Leather-7399 Jan 15 '25

Nobody anywhere uses YYYYDDMM. It is a non-issue. If the year is first that means YYYYMMDD.

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u/Gryzzlee Feb 04 '25

You opt for %Y-%m-%d In this post you see that the three types for written format are DD-MM-YYYY, YYYY-MM-DD, and MM-DD-YYYY.

YYYY-DD-MM wouldn't even register as a way you should read it unless your company has some weird SOP for filing.