Oh, I didn't know that year-month-day was an international standard. You are right that it doesn't seem to be used that much in practice though, which is probably the main reason I find trying to read it difficult. For me at least, the only time I seem to encounter dates written that way is on Dreamwidth/Livejournal. (It is certainly preferable to month-day-year, which I can all too easily mistake for being written as day-month-year.)

I must admit I don't really understand complex coding though, so I can't really comment on the difficulty of the English-stripping.