I have always thought that the "British" format is more logical, as it at least goes from lesser (day) to greater (year) in a logical progression.
Little-endian is silly, but at least it's consistent.
Why would you start in the middle with month?
Historical reasons, presumably, from a time when dates were thought of as wordy things rather than numerical. Middle-endian is the most stupid way of formatting a date. (Which is where the
BRITISH date format falls down - our dates are little-endian but our times are big-endian, so it becomes a mess when you put them together
[1].)
However, neither is satisfactory anywhere likely to be read internationally, since neither gives an unambiguous result, unlike various alternatives, such as 01-Jun-2021 or 2021-06-01 (which no-one reads as YYYY-DD-MM).
Indeed. ISO date is clearly the best if it's ever going anywhere near a computer. Big-endian dates sort properly in ASCIIbetical order. Pretty-print with a three-letter month and four digit year so that older humans immediately understand the format, assuming they understand the language of the month abbreviations used.
Internally, machines are much better off counting the number of time units from some epoch or other. Less to go wrong.
[1] Obviously post-brexit we should insist that all timestamps are written 231.45:44:13T21-04-2021. GMT, obviously, none of this UTC rubbish.