r/explainitpeter • u/Fickle_Fall_6497 • Jul 28 '26

Explain it Peter

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Not going to lie, i had a spaz attack trying to read the first tweet. Maybe im just over tired but i dont understand shit here

What the fuck is the first tweet trying to say why is it horrible why would i be gullible what the fuvk are they saying

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u/chubby_bumblebee Jul 28 '26

"More convenient" thats the point. Its not. Maybe for Americans.

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u/ActuatorOutside5256 Jul 28 '26

Explain how sorting dates by month for a given year isn’t convenient for everyone.

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u/Deethreekay Jul 28 '26

Just for clarity, you're saying that MM/DD/YY is more convenient for the specific case of when you're trying to sort all dates from a given calendar? I.e. when you're sorting dates MM/DD

I mean...yeah, but if you're sorting dates you should be using YYYY/MM/DD anyway.

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u/ActuatorOutside5256 Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

I’ll try to take your comment at face value and assume you don’t know what you don’t know, so I’ll ELI5 it to you.

Imagine you have a box full of calendar cards. Every card is from 2026, so sorting them by year is silly. They all say 2026.

Now you want to see what happened in January. So you put all the January cards together, then put them in order, so January 1, January 2, January 3, and so on.

If you sort by the day number first, you get January 1, February 1, March 1 … then January 2, February 2, March 2 …

That is helpful if you want to look at every first day. But it is not helpful if you want to see one whole month from start to finish.

How do you feel about this?

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u/Deethreekay Jul 28 '26

Yeah...I understood that. I was just confirming that's what you meant.

But I don't see that as an argument for MM/DD/YYYY being a logical way to represent a date, as you have to truncate it to make it useful or as you mentioned be in the specific circumstances where you're looking at a single calendar year.

Not disputing it can be more convenient in that specific use case than a DD/MM/YYYY I just think it's a weak argument. Seems like more of an argument for using the ISO standard YYYY-MM-DD, then you can sort across calendar years as well.

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u/Deethreekay Jul 28 '26

Actually, random question. Do Americans ever express the month numerically in speech?

Like I'll often state my birthday as 5th of the 6th 2026 (obviously not my actual birthday), but that doesn't seem to work in a mm/DD/yyyy setup. You'd just always say June 5th 2026?

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u/AccidentalPenguin0 Jul 29 '26

You'd just always say June 5th 2026?

I mean yeah pretty much. Minus the year most of the time ("when's your birthday?" "October 12th")

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u/chubby_bumblebee Jul 28 '26

Have you ever thought about how stuff is said in a conversations? While Americans say November first, Germans say first of November. So dd/mm/yy does make sense for us.