this post was submitted on 18 Apr 2024
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As a software dev who has lost weeks of his life dealing with timezones, leap days, daylight savings time, date math and other associated nonsense I fully support this being the way the world is. I don't want to go through the transition to get there though
thank you for your service, i usually resort to libraries doing the heavy lifting but even then it's tough and prone to error
Developers are the only people against DST changes, just because of how complex it will get. Dear God cities are removing DST! Cities! It means I need to know if you are in or out of a city to know if you need to be shown daylight or standard time!
Just please do it nationally yes or no
That's why it's lucky that identifiers in the tz database are already things like
America/New_Yorkinstead of "eastern time."Write everything in UTC, cast to local time zone for UIs
Life problems solved
That... still requires knowing which time zone to display. It doesn't remove the requirement at all.
.localtime(utctime)
and who implements localtime? You realize these functions call down to the system, and the system is very much ALSO written and maintained by coders...
The point is SOMEONE actually does have to implement it and maintain it.
That's essentially what I did in my recent UI that I made for someone.
Newfoundland has only just over 500k population and has a nice GMT-2:30 time zone. That's an extra half hour difference. Many cities are larger so I can see them wanting better time for themselves.
Ugh. Any time I need to set up a meeting for IST.
Bad news: this has nothing to do with timezones, leap days nor daylight saving time. Honestly, leap days would be worse because they wouldn't be part of the 7 day week
Leap day gets it's own name outside of saturday through sunday. It's an all awesome holiday.
... which fucks with the way the day of the week is calculated by computers as I already explained others
Y2k was handled. This can be too.
Didn't say it's not manageable, just said it's not easier
Just make them holidays, everyone works too much anyway, and it's just getting worse for no reason.
It's accounted for just like any other leap year, add it to the end of a month as a universal holiday. Most calendar models make it July 29. It's also worth noting that this is actually 364 days, and a single day at the end of the year is a universal holiday.
Edit: I think leap years should be at the end of the year too for simplicity.
Which breaks "day of week = day modulo 7" if every month starts on Monday and not every month has the same number of days
Look, short of changing Earth's orbit, something's not gonna line up no matter what you do. Extra-weekly days are as good a compromise as any in my book.
There is also a technological solution, I knew it
In this scheme, new years day and leap days are not any day of the week or part of any month. They exist outside of the regular calendar as obvious and explicit resets to the remainder problem.
My point exactly. So the programmer who commented above me is wrong in saying it makes it easier for them
No, still easier. They are still part of the year, so you can just count them, and the logic is still easier than the mess we currently have. If you really feel the need to you can call new years day the zeroth day in the zeroth month, the day of the week is Holiday, and periodically the zeroth month has one extra Holiday.
Computers store the date as "days after January 1st 1970". So you have a huge number, divide it with 7 and get the day of the week. If there are days that don't belong to any week, you have to calculate January 1st of that year and substrate it in addition to the steps above. I don't say it's not manageable, but it's not easier
They store the number of seconds since the epoch of 1970, but you're always going to have leap days and even leap seconds. Even if you changed the definition of a second to match the current length of a year, it would be off again relatively soon and you'd need leap seconds again. It's NEVER going to be as simple as you seem to think it should be. Chaos and complexity is inherent in the whole system.
I never said it was simple. The comment above me was "oh, this makes it much easier" and I was like "it's not really getting easier". That's all I said.
Yes, I understood. I still disagree for the reasons in all of my previous comments.
Let's agree to disagree
Leap day and new year day are supposed to not be a week day in this system
My point exactly. So the programmer who commented above me is wrong in saying it makes it easier for them
That would just be new year. I've already have a list ready for how to name all the months, so we don't fuck it up like September being the 9. Month again.
Ooh, tell me what the names would be! Don't leave me hanging. I HATE that September - December are all off.
Nice.
Wheezed at this, thanks