This looks neat. I wish it used iso8601 [0] dates. It’s pretty convenient as the time periods uses the format YYYY-MM-DD/YYYY-MM-DD and I think is easier to mentally parse than MM/DD/YYYY-MM/DD/YYYY.
Of course I didn’t even know what a solidus (“/“) was until using iso8601.
Also, I usually find standards pretty much as overhead, but 8601 seems pretty good as a universal standard.
As someone who grew up in the US, it's still bizarre as a programmer to have a mixed-significance ordering (MM-DD-YYYY) instead of any consistently-endian ordering (DD-MM-YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD).
Out of curiosity, in what order do Europeans verbally say full dates with month names? Or does it vary by language?
Important note: while a datestamp like YYYY-MM-DD does sort correctly, a datetime stamp such as YYYY-MM-DDThh-mm-ss does not because of DST and negative leap seconds.
Germanic (Dutch, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian) languages just say "10 october", they'd never say "October 10th". Before we get our 'english is so stupid!!!' hat on, in many of these (e.g. Dutch and German), the number '87' is pronounced 'seven-and-eighty' ('zevenentachtig' - 'zeven en tachtig' - seven and eighty), which is stupid. Languages are weird).
Same for the romance ones: It's just "Quatorze juillet" - 14th of July (Bastille day).
English is the weird one, but not that weird, "7th of october" is not much more complicated to say than "October 7th".
French is actually not so weird if you think about what a "score" is in English. Gettysburg address literally begins with "four score and seven years ago", which equals to 87.
I really hate watching historical documentaries where they spell out dates with day->month->year. If the intention is to teach, then the year is most important number and all other information is to be catalogued in context of broadest time period. The DD-MM-YYYY forces viewers to keep the whole date in their heads before it can be parsed and understood.
The "Algorithms to Live By" book has a good name for this: computational kindness. We should strive to reduce cognitive burden. The bigger the audience, the more effort should go into making data digestible. Unfortunately the established date standard goes against it.
The other problem is mixing endianness: the date information uses little endian, while numbers themselves are spelled out in big endian. The American MM-DD-YYYY on the other hand... I don't know what they were thinking.
Interesting thing I learned about historical battles: the most important part of the date is the season. In my country there were no battles during winter, early spring and late autumn, most were from April to September. It does not mean month is more important than year.
In portuguese people say "vinte de junho de dois mil e vinte dois", meaning "twenty of june of two thousand twenty two". The first few days of the month are ordinal: people say "primeiro de janeiro" meaning "first of january".
Japanese uses a neat system akin to YYYY-MM-DD. 2022-06-20 becomes ２０２１年６月２０日 meaning "2021 year 6 month 20 day". Really nice to read. Actual pronunciation is very irregular though, especially days of the month where about half of them are irregular.
In Sweden we say 20th June, 2022 and we even use a "DD/MM -YY" shorthand when signing documents for instance, although YYYY-MM-DD is also common and "the more correct".
I moved to the US from the UK a little over 10 years ago.
The numeric month and day of my birthday happen to be the same. For this anecdote lets assume it’s 01/01/1970.
When medical staff ask me for my date of birth, I’ll say “1st Jan 1970”. They’ll reply asking “Sorry, Jan 1st?” And I’ll say “yeah”. This blew my (programmer) mind.
Over the years I’ve rewired my brain to say “Jan 1st 1970” and avoid the extra round trip.
At first I wondered if it had something to do with word order in English, but it sounds like other English speaking countries don’t follow this pattern.
US English has several grammatical and pronunciation characteristics that were common in UK English about 300 years ago. Including being largely (but not totally) rhotic.
The one difference by language is the day: some languages say 1st or 7th, some just 1 or 7. In mine, except for 1st we use the day number, full reading is "day month, year" where the comma is a small extra space.
Of course I didn’t even know what a solidus (“/“) was until using iso8601.
Also, I usually find standards pretty much as overhead, but 8601 seems pretty good as a universal standard.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601