*Friend after a date*
Friend : Bro what according to you is a perfect date?

Me :DD/MM/YYYY....
Everything else is just confusing.

Friend:😒

Same, except I much prefer RFC-3339 :)

I prefer that too! But noo, we need to have like 734 standarts...

ISO 8601 YYYY-MM-DD is the international standard and the easiest to understand globally as it descends/ascends (depending on reading direction) in a logical order of multiplication and is easily sortable. This is the date you are looking for.

UNIX timestamp is the perfect date, if you ask me.

@nickhh number of seconds since a random point in time... That's ridiculous. It's like basing a system of date and time on the time since some guy called Jesus was born...

It's not random: it's a fixed point in time.

@nickhh yea but what's the relevance? And why make it different to the our established concept of date and time, and why use a single unit of measurement. It's over-engineering if I ever did see it. Also have fun with that in 2038...

YYYY-MM-DD is superior because it sorts easily

@ALivingMemory If you think that then you need do some more coding involving dates across the world...

Unix timestamp is merely the number of seconds between a particular date and the Unix Epoch. It should also be pointed out that this point in time technically does not change no matter where you are located on the globe. This is very useful to computer systems for tracking and sorting dated information in dynamic and distributed applications both online and client side. The reason why Unix timestamps are used by many webmasters is because they can represent all time zones at once.

@ALivingMemory with other words. VERY VERY USEFUL

@sadjad still illogical and an unnecessary abstraction

@ALivingMemory the you should give it a try to learn it so you understand it's value

@sadjad I have, but to me it seems unnecessary. It's 2017 everywhere in the world right now, doesn't matter what your timezone is, the ISO format will still represent a correct date/time and it's readable, a big ol' number isn't

imho you have false understanding of date representation (ISO, RFC etc), storing (eg unix timestamp is best, as it is timezone independent) and applying (e.g. sorting)

The best would be in my opinion the ISO, as a full ISO string defines sorting, has the timezone included, and is standardized.

The final reason for ISO full format would be that it is a defined string, which is parseable and prevents problem in storing...

the only problem is that it is not full supported by some rdbms, which causes problems - as an example, postgresql supports storing datetime with timezone. this however, is a problem of the rdbms, not the date itself.

sorry for being boring and pedantic, but... some of these things lead to some very grave failures in design.

final example: unix timestamps sucks - you cannot support multiple timezones, nor convert as the time zone simply does not exist (which is the reason why they were invented btw)

@IntrusionCM Amen. The full ISO format defines everything in a logical, sortable order including timezone. It's the most widely supported (except the examples you put) and tbh I just don't get why anyone would defend a format whereby you have to do extra work to make it usable (Unix) let's not re-invent the wheel and why not adopt a standard that covers all the bases whilst not needing a conversion to understand what it's saying!

ISO format because it ends that Day month year or month say Year confusion.