I think pretty much everyone here would agree. It's common convention that we need to change.

I'm Dutch and trying to push for YYYY-MM-DD because it's the only format that makes sense when sorting. Classmates have a lot of trouble with it and still put "Notes 18-10.docx" in a directory full of "Notes 2014-10-18.odt"-like files.

Though I would be pretty fine with DD-MM-YYYY, at least be consistent... The only format that I really object to is the American MM/DD/YYYY format.

DD-MM-YYYY -> "19th of October"

MM/DD/YYYY -> "October 19th"

Americans typically would say the latter, so it is consistent in that sense.

So the format comes from how it is read? That sounds plausible. "October 19th, 2014". I'd pronounce a date like "day, month, year" but always format it yyyy-mm-dd, it never struck me that a date format (abbreviation) should be possible to pronounce without first parsing it completely. It does make sense, I just never thought about it.

A reasonable (i.e. sortable) date format is 2014/10/19 but that would make sense in spoken form only as "2014, October 19th" which doesn't sound quite right.

A sidenote: in northern europe (Germany, Sweden etc.) we do it wrong on addresses: [Street, Number, PostalCode, City/Region, Country]. Going from smallest to largest context is actually done correctly in english [Number, Street, PostalCode, City/Region, Country]. You can sort addresses lexically!