US date order always makes me laugh - it's like people looked at date order and thought if the day comes before the month that will be the European way, lets flip it. Then they realised that would be YYYY-mm-dd and so be ISO standard order, dang can't have that, hey lets have a mixture.
I know it didn't happen this way but some sort of logical order would be good.
The order is logical, it maps to the way many americans speak. E.g. July 4th, 2000, which is always spoken as ... er... the 4th of july, 2009. Well. uh. Bad example.
I've taken to writing %d %b %Y when possible. It's unambiguous and provides sane ordering. And somehow I find it easier to map from %b to an ordinal than vice versa.
It would be good to hear a logical justification for the mm-dd-yyyy. I'm not sure I can come up with one. It makes it hard to search and it doesn't follow any sequential order. yyyy-mm-dd actually goes up by one each day. Try it next time you have to number give files a date stamp and you'll find it makes your life a lot simpler.
Of course I meant a justification for the mixed up ordering as being of greater utility (more easily parsed, understood, less confused, more easily read, better sorted, more standardised with other users) than the other common orderings.
Let the word go forth ... your logical justification please?
I know it didn't happen this way but some sort of logical order would be good.