What has happened to Intel lately?

[Nintendo Maniac 64]

tl;dr yyyy-mm-dd seems to largely be a compromise between the US and Europe date-formatting order.


In the US we don't write the date as mm-dd-yyyy because of some logical order, it's simply because we're used to it. We've been saying things like "March 8" for ages and then we tack on the year after that with a comma separating the two (March 8, 2013). Therefore when you turn the order backwards to yyyy-dd-mm you eliminate the in-grained "I'm just used to it"-ness and we can clearly see how nonsensical it is to put the day between the month and year.

Again, it's almost impossible to combat the concept of "I'm just used to it" (see: Zsnes), so you have to work around it. Because the year is already tacked on in US-date formatting, it is no problem to instead to tack on the year before the month. As long as those people get to use their "mm-dd" they'll be fine.


Now unlike the US, Europe already uses a sensible date-formatting order, so even if you turn it backwards it would still make sense (unlike that crazy yyyy-dd-mm). Therefore understanding yyyy-mm-dd should be no problem in Europe as well. I mean, Europe already thinks that mm-dd-yyyy makes no sense, so there shouldn't be any reason for a European to read the date as yyyy-dd-mm since that too would put the day between the month and year.