Always Date format with letters

For global companies there is only on correct way and that is writing the month with 3 letters (MMM) and year with all four numbers.

Are Americans to proud to admit this?

I think there is even made an iso with the wrong format, doh.

You can argue here from here and to way beyond the moon, how your logic is the best and most correct.

It is does not matter whether you are right or not in your world, it matters that in a global world you have other cultures with other ways of thinking and reasoning.
There will be more mistakes and misunderstanding.

For those of you with some experience in IT, you know that dates and formats can be tricky and cause some challenges. Suddenly an IT fellow forgot to think about that it could be another format, in the test output it was 03-05-2020, so finally got the programming right? 03-MAY-2021 or MAR-05-2021?

For global companies with multiple cultures and IT-systems al over, you will need to do it right, always use MMM/mmm, I don't f.(sorry) care whether you place it first, mid or last, but I do care that you make the month with letters.

I just had an issue from Global actor with a Danish site, everything was in Danish except for the date, is was American style for when they had there products in stock, which then appeared to be wrong in my part of the world.

If you can argue that you can write days with letters too, then you are way more advanced than me

The ISO format: YYYY-MM-DD
2021-02-10

ISO 8601 - Wikipedia

Except that months have different names in different languages, and not everybody abbreviates a word in the same way, nor do as many automated systems accept all the variants.
While the short to long construction has the ambiguous exchange of month and day due to the Americans, starting with the year (as @Sidney Vianna indicates) signals that it is in descending order, where that ambiguity does not arise.

Sidney and that ISO should be banned.

Once again ISO is wrong.

Jean_B you will still need to know and understand how it works.

Personal YYYY-MM-DD makes fine sense to me, but I would need to check to be sure. I worked in a global company once and we had like 5 different formats that was approved, and still people managed to get it wrong.

The IT-systems is a IT problem, and should be solved this way.

Fair point about different languages

It is my experience that using numbers in a global company, do cause way more risk and problems than MMM, if they have a common global language defined, which usually is English. If you mix the global language in the IT system, you will have a hell of other problems too.

I think language issues can be taken care of relative better than the numbers problems I have seen. That said I have never experienced the language issue, even from Asia, they seem to be very fluent in written English, often better than around here.

Mikael, I agree that dd-MMM-yyyy is best for quality system records where all global company sites document their records using the English language; however, I also agree that for product labels that must be translated, it is a simple way to reduce translation risk by having the manufacture and expiration dates in an consistent numeric-only format.

To aid in the fun on languages by (simplified) example: one root cause for using glue beyond its shelf life was that we changed to a cheaper, French language locale based variant of the same brand. There the expiry date was not noted as EXP - by itself already only identifiable as expiry date without further indication or prior experience - like was common before, but as DLU (date limite utilise), with yyyymm as indication. No hourglass symbol, no open jar symbol. Then having a look at all of the types of product lifetime (especially for glue, tac time, open time etc) and regional abbreviations. Which comedian said it best again? About our language having evolved to point towards food, warn of danger and shout profanities at other monkeys and beung severely overtasked for its current applications.

Not quite sure I grasp the point of this thread other than what appears to be some venting and some rather passive aggressive insulting of other members. Please keep the insults out of the responses. Perhaps they were made in jest, but just like the issue with the dates, misunderstandings can occur.

Might I suggest that if you have an issue with ISO 8601, feel free to get on their INTERNATIONAL Technical Committee. TC 154 consists of 14 participating member countries/territories and 29 observing member countries/territories. ISO 8601 states that the standardized date format is YYYYMMDD OR YYYY-MM-DD. You may personally find the approved approach incorrect, but the representation of multiple countries does not. For business purposes, such as programming that has global impacts, I'd offer that following a standard with global representation is a good way to go.

My own personal use is typically dd-MMM-yyyy where MMM is in text format, but this is just how jot things down in my logbook. When I'm creating files with multiple versions, I typically include an identifier that follows the YYYYMMDD format. ISO 8601 also states that dates and times cannot use words or characters - using numbers mitigates the translation issue (i.e., the spelling of a month can vary between languages).

I equate the YYYY-MM-DD approach to counting money. If you have a pocket of change, one normally does not count the pennies first, then the nickels, then the quarters. The logical approach is to start with the largest denomination and work your way down, with each unit a smaller value.

Plus the ISO format will sort correctly into chronological order, unlike many other formats.

Ah, because Miner wringed out the last thing there was to add to what has already been stated (and to keep it fun) I'll throw in one that caught me off guard last december, by a CEO nonetheless:
DD-XII-YYYY.