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Comment by ihateolives | Hacker News Reader

I once had to implement date picker that returned the date to be sent to backend to fetch the day's reservations. It seemed to work fine the day I implemented it. Next day it broke. Turned out the widget returned MM/DD/YYYY instead of DD/MM/YYYY. And I implemented it on 10th of October.

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Aliens landed on this planet, found out about the date format MM/DD/YYYY, and left in a hurry. They are currently preparing a gamma ray burst out of pure compassion and pity but also a hint of disgust!

Is that date format used anywhere outside the US? We have always used YYYY-MM-DD. Which is very nice, if for nothing you can use a single string sort if for whatever reason need to sort them.

In my world, there are two date formats: yyyy-mm-dd and dd.mm.yyyy.

Anything involving a slash is asking for trouble.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

I'm a big fan of ISO 8601. Eliminates the confusion, and sorts lexicographically too.

Yeah, me too. I had severe time constraints (heh) and just wanted to be done with it with minimal conversion. Which I then had to do anyway later. I also learned on that day that Javascript's getUTCMonth() is zero-based (January is month 0). And I had to sync time between timezones as well. I don't want to work with dates ever again.

I've learned the hard way that this is also dependent on the user's date format set on their computer in some libraries(iirc it was jquery ui date picker a few years back). its liberating when you decide to throw it all out and just use integers for all things not facing an end user.

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