Comment by PaulHoule

There are a few things you want about dates. 1932-04-12 sorts lexically, 04/12/1932 doesn't. So long as you don't use a timezone or always use the same timezone (especially Z) you get this nice property with ISO 8601 which makes it better than the alternatives. Once you include timezones you get into all sorts of problems such as dates (as opposed to date times) only having a partial ordering as the day here in New York starts an hour earlier than Chicago. In an extreme case the Pearl Harbor attack was launched the day after it was executed.

At some point you need real time aware libraries and whatever language you use they've been through several iterations of them (Javascript Date, moment, dayjs, ...) because they got it wrong the first time and probably the second time to.

With ISO 8601 it is easy to get the yyyy, yyyy-mm, hh and other things you might work with primitive tools (awk). Getting the day of the week or the time involved is not hard which gets you to the chronological rosetta stone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day

which is a multiplier and and offset away from Unixtime except for all those leap seconds and whatnot. With Unix timestamps comparison is easy and differences are easy and even knowing it is Thorsday is easy; they don't sort as strings but GNU sort has a -n option, only trouble is it is a bunch of twisty little numbers that look alike.