Dude, a date is a fixed point in time... just has less accuracy than if a time is included.

In what archaic system are int’s still 4 bytes?

When you have more experinece in programming in more languages, you'll find that in a lot of modern languages an int is always 32 bit and a long is 64 bits. Doesn't change if your system is 32 bits or 64 bits.

If I read your format on a 64-bit machine, it’ll break.

And this is exactly why many programming languages don't change the definition of int and long for different processor architectures.

You clearly don't have any experience with higher level programming languages, which you should really look into. If you have so little understanding of the problems with dates and times you should really only work in languages that have a well defined DateTime structure built in so you won't get into trouble with all the various edge cases and performance problems you're creating by not understanding why parsing date strings should be avoided whenever possible.

You know what’s not ambiguous ? “This time is stored as an ISO8601 string”.

Interesting that you were boldly claiming that experts use a dd-MM-yyyy format and now you're bringing up a format that starts with yyyy-MM-dd. Do you understand now why it's put into that order?

But yeah check out high level languages, they'll serialize dates into a standard format for you. Though I still have to put in serialization options to handle communications with partners that don't follow standards. Like all the time. I get enough headaches with just dates in a string formats when I can't avoid it that I know better than to do it when I can avoid it.

The meme you had that says that experts use dd-MM-yyyy is the wrong way around. Beginners use the built-in DateTime functionality that's offered by a high level language. Experts use this as well. It's only the mid tier devs that think they're going to come up with a better way on their own and get into the problems you're going to find yourself in.