> Are these date format strings part of ISO-8601 or standardized in some way? They look pretty much identical in JS and Python.
They’re part of Unicode.
> maybe a big help in preventing human error are editor plugins that verbalize what a given string represents
This is a good idea, but it’s easy to get this wrong. There are websites that let you enter a format string and it will format the date for you as a “preview”, and they often have a list of format specifiers that you can pick from. The issue is that it’s easy to pick YYYY because it might end up coming first in the list and have a description like “the year”, which makes it seem no different than the one you’d want to use.
They’re part of Unicode.
> maybe a big help in preventing human error are editor plugins that verbalize what a given string represents
This is a good idea, but it’s easy to get this wrong. There are websites that let you enter a format string and it will format the date for you as a “preview”, and they often have a list of format specifiers that you can pick from. The issue is that it’s easy to pick YYYY because it might end up coming first in the list and have a description like “the year”, which makes it seem no different than the one you’d want to use.