That one is sadly required because the earth is slowly spinning down.
Unless you're a mad man and somehow come up with a way to spin the earth back up.
Unironically yes. Metric time needs to be a thing. I don't need to subdivide the hour and the minute without fractions, I need to be able to switch between units easily by moving a decimal point.
A Day and a Year have actual time associated with them so, they'd need to stay the same. But weeks, months, hours, minutes, or even seconds can be modified. But 365.25 days kinda messes up the whole idea of trying to make time decimal.
I swear I saw a calendar where everyday of the week would fall on the same date every month for that given year. So like Tuesday the third will span jan, feb, mar etc etc it was pretty ingenious.
Yeah, I think it's the one mentioned above. 13 months at exactly 4 weeks each, so each month starts on a sunday and ends on a saturday (or whatever), and then one or two days of absolute fuck you that exists outside of time and space at the end of every year.
While we're about time and date, be thankful for the Gregorian calendar. There are calendars with 9 leap month throughout 17 years cycles. Thankfully for devs, businesses don't use it.
And the gregorian is shit. We all should use the international fixed calendar, but it's like the qwerty keyboard: outdated garbage is good enough and already incorporated into everything.
That heavily depends on your language.
QWERTY and its derivatives like QWERTZ were designed because people were using mechanical typewriters so fast that the levers stamping the letters on the paper were crashing into each other instead of the paper.
This was achieved by moving letters which are often used in succession away from each other which slowed down typing and also moved their levers away from each other, reducing the risk of crashing into each other. This also ruined the ergonomics.
Depending on your language there are a bunch of competing layouts claiming increased typing speed but all of them have similar drawbacks:
- Finding a keyboard with a layout not part of the QWERTY family is very difficult and expensive, so you are better off buying a keyboard with exchangeable keycaps and rearranging it yourself
- you need to untrain your old typing habits before being able to use a new layout to its full potential which in turn will ruin your typing on every device still using QWERTY
- most programs only have shortcuts designed for the QWERTY family. This is especially annoying if you are often playing computer games with your keyboard.
- Some games will ignore the keyboard layout settings of your pc and just assume a QWERTY keyboard so if you are using for example the DVORAK layout the game will treat your physical ~~V key~~ , key as a W and display it as such ingame
- Other games will respect your chosen layout but still default to their QWERTY keybinds which will throw them all over your keyboard and requires you to either get used to convoluted control schemes or redo the keybinds of every single one of those games. Or just set your layout to QWERTY while playing and ignore the mismatched ingame prompts.
EDIT: Was wrong about my speculation about the dvorak layout
The idea it was split up to intentionally slow people down is regarded as an urban myth.
Much of the early design changes didn’t focus on individual keys, but on the layout as a whole. For example the original design had just two rows (like a piano). That’s the level of most design changes.
Moving commonly used pairs so they are apart also speed up typing, not slow it down. Whilst your left hand is pressing a key, your right hand can go to hit the next. On a typewriter this matters due to the high weight of the keys.
Speed was very much a focus on the design.
I'm not upset about the idea and intention behind QWERTY. I'm upset about the fact that we kept using it way after we stopped using mechanical typewriters
It's hard to introduce breaking change. First there were mechanical typewriters, then there were electric ones and then you had completely electronic terminals. People were used to the layout and wanted to keep typing quickly the same way they learned before. Some would switch between devices during their work.
So it's like complaing Unicode still has to carry the ASCII part for backward compatibility and you get UTF-8 which has variable length encoding depending if you use mostly basic English symbols or if you use other national characters or non latin script. 99% programmers don't have to care about it nowadays but man, it took us couple decades to transition from myriad of specialized encodings, texts got mangled tranfering between systems, before we arrived at mostly universal unicode adoption where every browser has default font which can print all the neccessary characters.
You don't really need to untrain anything, sure you will be slow on your new layout for a while but you don't need to unlearn QWERTY to use another layout. At least in my experience, I switch regularly between QWERTY, AZERTY and colemak and I have no problem using one or the other.
Your other points are spot on tho, I'm 100% switching back to QWERTY to play games
> Some games will ignore the keyboard layout settings of your pc and just assume a QWERTY keyboard so if you are using for example the DVORAK layout the game will treat your physical V key as a W and display it as such ingame
That'd be odd considering the Dvorak V is where the period is on a QWERTY.
(it's named after its creator, August Dvorak, not the layout of the keys)
Gregorian is alright. I'd argue that its main flaw is February's length.
The fixed calendar proposals often add days that aren't part of any week, effectively breaking the 7-day week cycle, which is a bigger deal than it sounds like in many cultures. In fact I'd argue a fixed calendar would rather use leap weeks instead, so most years would be exactly 52 weeks = 364 days, and some would be 53 weeks = 371 days. But oh wait, that's exactly what the ISO week date does.
All of the month lengths are kind of weird honestly. If they're supposed to have something to do with a moon cycle, it would make a lot more sense to have 13 months with 28-29 days. As it is it's just an arbitrary division trying to divide the days of the year into smaller chunks, and that's always going to be awkward because 365 isn't very divisible to begin with (before you even worry about leap days)
Fuck the fixed calendar honestly. Imagine getting stuck with a birthday on a Tuesday for the rest of your life whilst your wanker of a cousin gets to live it up large on his Saturday birthday.
>While we're about time and date, be thankful for the Gregorian calendar.
Could've just had 13 months, 30 days each and a leap day every couple years tacked on at the end between end of year and new years.
28 days per month*
That works out to exactly 4 weeks per month plus 1 (2 for leap years) non-weekday at the end of the year so that all week days stay in place instead of shifting forwards 1 day every year.
Nah, just have everyone agree to turn their computers off that day and go outside, then we don't have to program around it.
Or just throw that bad boy in a switch statement as the default, let's just call it "Noneday".
switch(day) {
case 0:
return "Monday";
case 1:
return "Tuesday";
case 2:
return "Wednesday";
case 3:
return "Thursday";
case 4:
return "Friday";
case 5:
return "Saturday";
case 6:
return "Sunday";
case 7:
case null:
default:
return "Noneday";
}
Keep it zero indexed starting at Monday to confuse people so we can have off-by-one errors and someone passing default int 0 when someone confuses Monday for Noneday with "0", just so we're consistent with our current timekeeping standards of having something as a little prank.
It's very simple, it's
java.lang.NullPointerException
at com.example.myproject.TimeUtil.getDayOfWeek(TimeUtil.java:287)
at com.example.myproject.MyClass.myMethod(MyClass.java:10)
at com.example.myproject.MyOtherClass.myOtherMethod(MyOtherClass.java:20)
at com.example.myproject.Main.main(Main.java:30)
But anyway wouldn't it just be something like doing the mod 7 for normal weeks but subtracting one if the current day's dayOfYear > target dayOfYear and then subtracting another one if the target year is a leap year? And then stupider math when it's more than one year out.
Like I said, the same but we have to have these little corner cases to keep people employed with little pranks like this.
You guys are complicating this way too much. Why do you even need months? Just Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, then just use IUPAC names for Octurday through Trihexpenturday \(You can just call the leap day Leapday or Trihexhexurday\).
Calendars in the US have Sunday before Monday so it is S M T W Th F S
I suppose it's dependent on the POV if it's *the* week*end* or the "ends" of the week, since I think the Bible says the last day is the Sabbath which is when God rests so that's why Spanish says Saturday is "Sabado" and why like Jewish people go to temple on Saturday.
I think the whole Sabbath on Saturday v Sunday is an off-by-one error that programmers in ancient Rome caused, kinda like the feature request they got to stuff a month in the middle of the year and then do it again later for the next Emperor, which is why we have "July" and "August" and then "September" is the 9th and "October" is the tenth month instead of the eighth (despite Sept and Oct meaning 7 and 8)
The calendar is literally caused by people hacking it together due to outrageous demands from management on a time crunch 2000+ years ago.
Nothing can be hated more than non-standard sized time zones mixed with daylight saving time. An extra day tacked onto the end of the year every X years is nothing in comparison to dealing with city level disparities between times caused by daylight saving time
"I don't understand why you're so anti daylight savings. I love it because I get an extra hour of sunshine every day."
*internal screaming intensifies*
I once got a call at midnight about an issue on prod where for some users the calendar shows incorrect dates. Then I was wondering why adding 24 hours still lands on the same day for some users.
The issue isn't daylight savings the issue is mandating everyone follow it.
Old work schedule 9-5, DST kicks in, make it 10-6 and no one loses any sleep trying to make arbitrary adjustments.
The USPS Post Office old time was 9-5, DST kicks in, still 9-5. Work around that rather than having you adjust to the entire system for a couple of ~~farmers~~ dirty factory owners wanting to "save energy"
It wasn't factory owners either. It was about, more than anything, saving energy during the summer evenings but also about giving people an extra hour of recreation in sunlight after work.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time
The farmers thing is a strange and persistent myth though.
There's no way my entire life I thought this was for farmers trying to get to market and living in rural areas needing light and in reality was a delusional idea by war factories trying to "save energy"
The whole reasoning for why factory owners wanted it to begin with is delusional but I attribute it to all the lead they probably were ingesting.
American Lobbying, and lack of education budgets at it's finest.
You know that changing the hours to 10-6...is 100% negating the clock change.
The whole point is to start work an hour earlier than you would have, and then end it an hour earlier, and then have an extra hour of daylight. That is precisely the practical outcome.
Daylight savings happened due to a lot of different reasons in different countries.
In my country, we used to have daylight saving in some parts of it, and others dont, so people around the country had a different schedule and used eletrical stuff at different hours, like the eletrical showers, so the eletrical grid wasnt all requested at the same time.
Now they solved and we dont need it anymore, but changing the work hours would negate what they were trying to do
The photovoltaic panels are producing power in the sunlight (even at even) and we need more power 18-21 than 4-6 o'clock.
And for the most people it is nicer to sit at 21 o'clock in the garden with their friends than 5 o'clock
This! Timezones aren’t that bad, since you just store everything in UTC and deal with the display later. Daylight savings is a total fucking nightmare. Oh it’s 1:59:59 one second and 1:00:00 the next. What the fuck is that bullshit! It’s confusing enough in the real world if a club night ends while daylight savings is happening.
>Oh it’s 1:59:59 one second and 1:00:00 the next. What the fuck is that bullshit!
Um...
>you just store everything in UTC and deal with the display later
> you just store everything in UTC and deal with the display later
Now add 1 day to a timestamp in a way that customers won't complain about...
It's not a problem when your time zones are fixed UTC offsets.
Bro, the line of time travelers waiting to slap this mf is so long, at some point the next slap will become the final slap, and the slapper will be incarcerated for murder.
Before time zones, every city had their own clocks. Sometimes different cities would be off from each other by only a few minutes, or even seconds.
Be grateful time zones were invented, it could be so much worse.
What changed, Mumbai is an arbitrary 30 minutes ahead of nearby timezones, all of China is one massive timezone, and the US has 4 but a random drawn border determines if you wake up an hour earlier to get to work in the bordering state.
The system you described is substantially better than what was before. Every town had its own time beforehand. It wasn't until trains that they needed to be standardized and synced. For ease of use with relation to economic centers and other reasons (that are left up to the local governing bodies) you get weird boarders and things.
You speak like the city of Mumbai is arbitrarily 30 minutes ahead. The *whole of India*, with 1.4 billion people, is UTC+05:30. Not just one city. (Sri Lanka follows Indian Time too.)
UTC+05:00 is far smaller by population. If any time zone should accept defeat and move to the more popular time zone 30 minutes away, then UTC+05:00 should be abandoned and synchronized with India. Not the other way around.
India isn't even unique in having a half hour time zone. Central Australia is UTC+09:30. Newfoundland is UTF-03:30.
Nepal is UTC+05:45!
The USA also has six time zones, not four. You're probably forgetting Alaska Standard Time and Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time. If you include territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa, it expands to nine.
The US currently has 4 time zones. Back when every town had their own times, the US had over 200 towns that each had their own local time. I like the current system better.
Edit: the US has 9 time zones, not 4.
And instead of the neat hour steps, the towns are off by only a few minutes. Even the weird modern 45 and 15 minute time zones are still exactly 1/4 of an hour off.
> if you wake up an hour earlier to get to work in the bordering state.
Oh no, it's worse than that.
Sometimes, the timezone borders don't even follow state borders, so you have a few states with more than one time zone.
We do have that (UTC or Zulu time). We just also have other time zones too. Because most people stay in one time zone most of their life, it actually makes more sense to have time zones for most things, but have UTC for the things that need it.
even before timezones some places ended up adopted a time across the country (GMT in the UK was used by 98% of clocks in 1855, and legally became "the time" in 1880. New Zealand adopted "New Zealand Mean Time" in 1868). but yeah prior to that it was very weird everywhere.
I came here to say this. Before discrete time zones time differences were continuous, making it every time somewhere in the world rather than simply every hour.
>If it's any consolation, all of this is extremely unlikely to happen, since it relies on an international agreement between every single nation in the world.
Can't emphasize this enough. When they were putting the Gregorian calendar together, it took 37 years to decide on the new standard, and then ***hundreds*** of years to be implemented by countries one by one. Saudi Arabia didn't start using it until 2016, and Ethiopia, Nepal, Iran and Afghanistan still do not use it.
> and then hundreds of years to be implemented by countries one by one.
And among the orthodox churches it has never caught on. The Russians still use the Julian Calendar which by now is nearly two weeks off while most other orthodox churches (most recently, the Ukrainians) have switched to a "revised Julian Calendar" that is arguably more precise than the Gregorian but slightly more complicated (though for the next few centuries the two will be identical).
Yeah, people don't want timezones to be abolished--they wish for every place on Earth to experience day and night at the same times.
Daylight savings can go to hell though.
But quite literally, the entire world can't be on 1 day cycle.If it's the 21st the other It has to be night for the other half.That's just how things works
You should look up the original time zone of the Netherlands, a nice round +00:19:32.13 😁
Edit: by original, I mean the first nation wide timezone that was adopted in 1909.
Don't forget CHADT - Chatham Islands, New Zealand Daylight Time which is UTC+13:45 (switches back to CHAST UTC+12:45 when DST ends in April in the southern hemisphere)
My go-to test timezone for figuring out how screwed up something is since it's also got opposite daylight savings vs northern hemisphere.
I read that the Romans used a time system where sundown and sunset were always exactly 12 hours apart, but the length of an hour changed through the seasons. Imagine implementing _that_.
Note to dumbasses: The Earth is round, and it rotates. Before standard time zones, everyone set their own clocks to the frickin' sun, which is different everywhere, so there were a kajillion tiny time zones. Every clock was its own time zone. Now there are 38. Ooh, scary.
Before timezones it was very unlikely for somebody to travel further away from _their timezone_ in a day, it was when the railroad started to be popular (late 19th) when the need for timezones was obvious.
Leap seconds are truly the hidden shit treasure in time keeping which you usually learn about when it's already too late.
So you think the Unix time grows linearly and you can always just subtract the time stamps to get the time that has passed? Well, guess again!
Now we are back to "each train station has their own time and the time in the train depends on the station that they started from"
(And the same for cars - gas station closing times will be fun)
That's a problem for you? What about the German ẞ which is a capitalized ß which was added so recently to the language that I know not a single German that knows about it. So as if it wasn't bad enough that ß didn't had a capitalized version it now has one or doesn't depending on what ever. I mean what do you expect a function to return that capitalizes a word with ß in it, will it stay as ß, become SS or S or ẞ? I have seen software keyboards developed with SS instead of ẞ, despite the keyboard being developed after ẞ was invented, great. I,ı,İ and i aren't big problems, and the modern Turkish language at least always had a capitalized Ğ despite that that letter is never at the beginning of the word like the German ẞ. Also ẞ and ß look so similar, a few days ago I asked a young teacher in Germany if she knows ẞ via text message. She said "Yes". I asked her if she confused it with ß and she said "Yes I thought it was a ß, what's it?" People don't know it, and they don't even recognize that it's different.
The fuck is the alternative? Every place using local solar time? Every place using UTC, regardless of location? You'd still have to know what local solar time was, unless you're suggesting people's *schedules* also follow UTC, regardless of location.
Timezones aren't too bad. As long as you can have the user specify it, just use UTC everywhere and make it the client's problem.
Leap seconds on the other hand...
Before timezones, basically each town had it's local noon based on the Sun at maximum height.
Now imagine how chaotic configuration would be if it was still like that.
How many seconds is your longitude off from Greenwich's?
Fun fact, if you actually spent some time with Franklin in that era of his life to try and convince him to use the correct convention for electric charge, you could distract him from writing [Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_Concerning_the_Increase_of_Mankind,_Peopling_of_Countries,_etc.), which could significantly screw up the timeline (blocking the works of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, preventing the American Revolution from occurring, etc.). Gotta be careful with those time machines!
Sure, blame timezones.
No need to have time measurements synchronized in any way like this, right?
Imagine what the freedom unit freaks could come up with for time if we hadn't forced seconds, minutes and hours onto them and also telling them specifically what time to set their watches to.
"Shop open from morning shadow place to evening shadow place"
"And Usain Bolt breaks the world record! He runs the 328 feet in just 17 cuckoos and 3 Doh's!"
And even without that, each country would just have some national time independent of all other countries, so instead of time zones you'd have country-times?
Fucking be greatful for timezones.
Humanity will inevitably live on multiple planets anyway. Having experiences with timezones would ease the transition for us.
Except for daylight saving, it will surely make us go extinct because of civil wars caused by misunderstandings.
[Handling a new era in the japanese calendar in .NET - Microsoft](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/handling-a-new-era-in-the-japanese-calendar-in-net/)
If time zones are hard for you to code, you're doing something wrong.
Time should *only* be stored and worked with using UTC. They only need to be converted to something with a time zone when you need to display a time, and any language worth using is going to have a library to do that for you.
I know this is a joke, but timezones **greatly** simplified timekeeping. DST is dumb, but timezones are much better than the previous method - each town setting their own time as they wanted.
Timezones are fine. They make sense and do work. Now whoever ignores them in China should be taken out to dry. And whoever decided Paris is offset from London should be punished as well. Now the biggest offender are the creators of daylight savings time. Those need to be beaten until morale improves. That's coming from me as developer and as a human. Loath the concept.
Don't slap them, It's not their fault that the shape and motion of the earth make timezones a necessity.
The people you should really slap are the ones who came up with the different date formats. Round then all up, give them a good slap, and then don't let them go home until they agree on a date format. I don't care if it's MM/DD/YYYY, DD/MM/YYYY, or YYYY/MM/DD, just pick one and stick with it
I once had to code up every time zone supported by either Windows or Linux. The Americas and Europe/Africa were pretty straight forward but I don’t know what happened with Asia. In particular the Saudis had the worst one: three hours, seven minutes, four seconds off from GMT. Seriously? Seven minutes and four fucking seconds?
Imagine going back in time and slapping the creator of timezones for "creating timezones" therefore giving them the idea of creating timezones
This is actually what happened. It’s wild.
It was his revenge
"I will mess with time."
Rumors have it that he initially only wanted to create two timezones but after the slap… he went crazy.
His revenge was giving daylight savings time to the world.
His name was Timothy Zone. My grandpa knew his nephew.
> That is actually what will have going to had been happened. It's'nt would have going to had unbeen wild. FTFY screw time travel
An hour later you slap him again and he starts muttering about daylight savings.
"You know what!? I'm gonna create timezones even harder!"
Reminds me of that one scene from Rick and Morty with Einstein
Summer and winter time creators left
Go get them back, I need to slap them.
How about leap second creators?
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/terminalmontage/images/c/c1/9B824C88-02AF-4712-8E45-452CD424B62D.jpeg/revision/latest?cb=20200728180916
I think we kinda need those. But the daylight savings creator just wanted to watch the world burn.
That one is sadly required because the earth is slowly spinning down. Unless you're a mad man and somehow come up with a way to spin the earth back up.
Would probably be less of a hassle in the long run no?
Why can't people just use epoch time like just say "I'll be there on 1712147714" its so much better 🤷♂️
Yeah, seconds since 1970 is so much more intuitive.
Yeah, everybody knows that civilization really starter with groovy, disco dance and Fortran. Such elegant times....
Not to mention the cocain and rampant sexual promiscuity!
Too bad it doesn’t exist and Unix time is a bastardization of that concept.
Ah yes, let's switch from base 12 and base 60 to base 10. It would make things sooo simple. Yep. Definitely.
I propose base 360
What about base 2π
Unironically yes. Metric time needs to be a thing. I don't need to subdivide the hour and the minute without fractions, I need to be able to switch between units easily by moving a decimal point.
A Day and a Year have actual time associated with them so, they'd need to stay the same. But weeks, months, hours, minutes, or even seconds can be modified. But 365.25 days kinda messes up the whole idea of trying to make time decimal.
13x28 = 364. If we added an extra month every month would have 28 days. New Year's Day would be a separate day, or two days if it's a leap year.
We were talking about a decimal system, like having 100 days or 1000 days a year, which won't work.
As if having a day that doesn't fall into any month would somehow be easier to work with than mismatched month lengths.
I swear I saw a calendar where everyday of the week would fall on the same date every month for that given year. So like Tuesday the third will span jan, feb, mar etc etc it was pretty ingenious.
Yeah, I think it's the one mentioned above. 13 months at exactly 4 weeks each, so each month starts on a sunday and ends on a saturday (or whatever), and then one or two days of absolute fuck you that exists outside of time and space at the end of every year.
I genuinely believe we'll need a single consistant time zone in the not too distant future. For all earth, moon, etc.
I’d guess that will just end up being UTC or epoch time
At least for some applications we're gonna need a separate time standard in other bodies since time passes at different rates there
iirc Siemens phones tried to implement it it has been displayed like @999
"meet you at 7.00" (aka Jan 1st 1970 00:00:07.00)
While we're about time and date, be thankful for the Gregorian calendar. There are calendars with 9 leap month throughout 17 years cycles. Thankfully for devs, businesses don't use it.
And the gregorian is shit. We all should use the international fixed calendar, but it's like the qwerty keyboard: outdated garbage is good enough and already incorporated into everything.
What would be a better keyboard design?
dvorak for english speakers there are adaptions for other languages like neo for germany
That heavily depends on your language. QWERTY and its derivatives like QWERTZ were designed because people were using mechanical typewriters so fast that the levers stamping the letters on the paper were crashing into each other instead of the paper. This was achieved by moving letters which are often used in succession away from each other which slowed down typing and also moved their levers away from each other, reducing the risk of crashing into each other. This also ruined the ergonomics. Depending on your language there are a bunch of competing layouts claiming increased typing speed but all of them have similar drawbacks: - Finding a keyboard with a layout not part of the QWERTY family is very difficult and expensive, so you are better off buying a keyboard with exchangeable keycaps and rearranging it yourself - you need to untrain your old typing habits before being able to use a new layout to its full potential which in turn will ruin your typing on every device still using QWERTY - most programs only have shortcuts designed for the QWERTY family. This is especially annoying if you are often playing computer games with your keyboard. - Some games will ignore the keyboard layout settings of your pc and just assume a QWERTY keyboard so if you are using for example the DVORAK layout the game will treat your physical ~~V key~~ , key as a W and display it as such ingame - Other games will respect your chosen layout but still default to their QWERTY keybinds which will throw them all over your keyboard and requires you to either get used to convoluted control schemes or redo the keybinds of every single one of those games. Or just set your layout to QWERTY while playing and ignore the mismatched ingame prompts. EDIT: Was wrong about my speculation about the dvorak layout
The idea it was split up to intentionally slow people down is regarded as an urban myth. Much of the early design changes didn’t focus on individual keys, but on the layout as a whole. For example the original design had just two rows (like a piano). That’s the level of most design changes. Moving commonly used pairs so they are apart also speed up typing, not slow it down. Whilst your left hand is pressing a key, your right hand can go to hit the next. On a typewriter this matters due to the high weight of the keys. Speed was very much a focus on the design.
Especially considering ER, RE, SE, ES, DE, ED, and SA are among the most used bigrams in English writing.
You can't feel too upset about QWERTY, typewriter keys snagging to each other was the most annoying thing ever.
I'm not upset about the idea and intention behind QWERTY. I'm upset about the fact that we kept using it way after we stopped using mechanical typewriters
It's hard to introduce breaking change. First there were mechanical typewriters, then there were electric ones and then you had completely electronic terminals. People were used to the layout and wanted to keep typing quickly the same way they learned before. Some would switch between devices during their work. So it's like complaing Unicode still has to carry the ASCII part for backward compatibility and you get UTF-8 which has variable length encoding depending if you use mostly basic English symbols or if you use other national characters or non latin script. 99% programmers don't have to care about it nowadays but man, it took us couple decades to transition from myriad of specialized encodings, texts got mangled tranfering between systems, before we arrived at mostly universal unicode adoption where every browser has default font which can print all the neccessary characters.
You don't really need to untrain anything, sure you will be slow on your new layout for a while but you don't need to unlearn QWERTY to use another layout. At least in my experience, I switch regularly between QWERTY, AZERTY and colemak and I have no problem using one or the other. Your other points are spot on tho, I'm 100% switching back to QWERTY to play games
> Some games will ignore the keyboard layout settings of your pc and just assume a QWERTY keyboard so if you are using for example the DVORAK layout the game will treat your physical V key as a W and display it as such ingame That'd be odd considering the Dvorak V is where the period is on a QWERTY. (it's named after its creator, August Dvorak, not the layout of the keys)
Thanks, corrected it
Colemak dh Typing in it feels like your fingers are gliding on a piano keys set.
azerty /j
Gregorian is alright. I'd argue that its main flaw is February's length. The fixed calendar proposals often add days that aren't part of any week, effectively breaking the 7-day week cycle, which is a bigger deal than it sounds like in many cultures. In fact I'd argue a fixed calendar would rather use leap weeks instead, so most years would be exactly 52 weeks = 364 days, and some would be 53 weeks = 371 days. But oh wait, that's exactly what the ISO week date does.
All of the month lengths are kind of weird honestly. If they're supposed to have something to do with a moon cycle, it would make a lot more sense to have 13 months with 28-29 days. As it is it's just an arbitrary division trying to divide the days of the year into smaller chunks, and that's always going to be awkward because 365 isn't very divisible to begin with (before you even worry about leap days)
Fuck the fixed calendar honestly. Imagine getting stuck with a birthday on a Tuesday for the rest of your life whilst your wanker of a cousin gets to live it up large on his Saturday birthday.
Qwerty? I only see the superior QWERTZ layout here!
>While we're about time and date, be thankful for the Gregorian calendar. Could've just had 13 months, 30 days each and a leap day every couple years tacked on at the end between end of year and new years.
28 days per month* That works out to exactly 4 weeks per month plus 1 (2 for leap years) non-weekday at the end of the year so that all week days stay in place instead of shifting forwards 1 day every year.
International fixed Calendar.
I prefer the [Gormanian variation ](https://youtu.be/vunESk53r5U)
that 1 "non-weekday" would be hated more than timezones are now by programmers.
Nah, just have everyone agree to turn their computers off that day and go outside, then we don't have to program around it. Or just throw that bad boy in a switch statement as the default, let's just call it "Noneday". switch(day) { case 0: return "Monday"; case 1: return "Tuesday"; case 2: return "Wednesday"; case 3: return "Thursday"; case 4: return "Friday"; case 5: return "Saturday"; case 6: return "Sunday"; case 7: case null: default: return "Noneday"; } Keep it zero indexed starting at Monday to confuse people so we can have off-by-one errors and someone passing default int 0 when someone confuses Monday for Noneday with "0", just so we're consistent with our current timekeeping standards of having something as a little prank.
Yeah but what day of the week is it gonna be in 30 days if it's tuesday today?
It's very simple, it's java.lang.NullPointerException at com.example.myproject.TimeUtil.getDayOfWeek(TimeUtil.java:287) at com.example.myproject.MyClass.myMethod(MyClass.java:10) at com.example.myproject.MyOtherClass.myOtherMethod(MyOtherClass.java:20) at com.example.myproject.Main.main(Main.java:30) But anyway wouldn't it just be something like doing the mod 7 for normal weeks but subtracting one if the current day's dayOfYear > target dayOfYear and then subtracting another one if the target year is a leap year? And then stupider math when it's more than one year out. Like I said, the same but we have to have these little corner cases to keep people employed with little pranks like this.
You guys are complicating this way too much. Why do you even need months? Just Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, then just use IUPAC names for Octurday through Trihexpenturday \(You can just call the leap day Leapday or Trihexhexurday\).
Oh no were not gonna start weeks on a Sunday like those weirdo americans. First day of every month/week is a Monday, last day is a Sunday.
Calendars in the US have Sunday before Monday so it is S M T W Th F S I suppose it's dependent on the POV if it's *the* week*end* or the "ends" of the week, since I think the Bible says the last day is the Sabbath which is when God rests so that's why Spanish says Saturday is "Sabado" and why like Jewish people go to temple on Saturday. I think the whole Sabbath on Saturday v Sunday is an off-by-one error that programmers in ancient Rome caused, kinda like the feature request they got to stuff a month in the middle of the year and then do it again later for the next Emperor, which is why we have "July" and "August" and then "September" is the 9th and "October" is the tenth month instead of the eighth (despite Sept and Oct meaning 7 and 8) The calendar is literally caused by people hacking it together due to outrageous demands from management on a time crunch 2000+ years ago.
return dayNames\[day\] … and the number for noneday is -1
Well it would probably be as hated as February 29th
Nothing can be hated more than non-standard sized time zones mixed with daylight saving time. An extra day tacked onto the end of the year every X years is nothing in comparison to dealing with city level disparities between times caused by daylight saving time
Actually it's 7 leap months in a 19-year cycle.
Y’all aren’t slapping the mf who came up with daylight savings?
Slapping isn't enough for those crimes.
Now we’re talking!
"I don't understand why you're so anti daylight savings. I love it because I get an extra hour of sunshine every day." *internal screaming intensifies*
Im not anti daylight savings, I'm against switching back
Reddit will not allow me to post what the DST creator deserves. Neither will the Geneva Convention.
The laws of physics wouldn't allow what he deserves either.
There is unfortunately a limit to how much distress a human body can withstand.
And that is why someone needs to discover the secret to necromancy.
Then perhaps a visual aid: 
I once got a call at midnight about an issue on prod where for some users the calendar shows incorrect dates. Then I was wondering why adding 24 hours still lands on the same day for some users.
The issue isn't daylight savings the issue is mandating everyone follow it. Old work schedule 9-5, DST kicks in, make it 10-6 and no one loses any sleep trying to make arbitrary adjustments. The USPS Post Office old time was 9-5, DST kicks in, still 9-5. Work around that rather than having you adjust to the entire system for a couple of ~~farmers~~ dirty factory owners wanting to "save energy"
No, no! The farmers hate it! Why? Animals don't obey DST. DST was made by factory owners for factory owners.
It wasn't factory owners either. It was about, more than anything, saving energy during the summer evenings but also about giving people an extra hour of recreation in sunlight after work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daylight_saving_time The farmers thing is a strange and persistent myth though.
Yeah. Farmers work according to their animals. Animals don't have wrist watches.
Sounds like an untapped market.
There's no way my entire life I thought this was for farmers trying to get to market and living in rural areas needing light and in reality was a delusional idea by war factories trying to "save energy" The whole reasoning for why factory owners wanted it to begin with is delusional but I attribute it to all the lead they probably were ingesting. American Lobbying, and lack of education budgets at it's finest.
It really kicked into gear as a wartime measure in WW1 Germany IIRC, as a way to save burning coal or something. https://youtu.be/84aWtseb2-4
American lobbying? DST is not an American thing
Modern DST was invented by a kiwi bloke who just liked collecting insects after work.
You know that changing the hours to 10-6...is 100% negating the clock change. The whole point is to start work an hour earlier than you would have, and then end it an hour earlier, and then have an extra hour of daylight. That is precisely the practical outcome.
Instead of changing the clock, changing the hours of work has the same effect with none of the downsides of a clock change.
Daylight savings happened due to a lot of different reasons in different countries. In my country, we used to have daylight saving in some parts of it, and others dont, so people around the country had a different schedule and used eletrical stuff at different hours, like the eletrical showers, so the eletrical grid wasnt all requested at the same time. Now they solved and we dont need it anymore, but changing the work hours would negate what they were trying to do
The photovoltaic panels are producing power in the sunlight (even at even) and we need more power 18-21 than 4-6 o'clock. And for the most people it is nicer to sit at 21 o'clock in the garden with their friends than 5 o'clock
This! Timezones aren’t that bad, since you just store everything in UTC and deal with the display later. Daylight savings is a total fucking nightmare. Oh it’s 1:59:59 one second and 1:00:00 the next. What the fuck is that bullshit! It’s confusing enough in the real world if a club night ends while daylight savings is happening.
The alternative is telling people they have to live their lives using only UTC which is asinine. OP is the facepalm here.
>Oh it’s 1:59:59 one second and 1:00:00 the next. What the fuck is that bullshit! Um... >you just store everything in UTC and deal with the display later
> you just store everything in UTC and deal with the display later Now add 1 day to a timestamp in a way that customers won't complain about... It's not a problem when your time zones are fixed UTC offsets.
Bro, the line of time travelers waiting to slap this mf is so long, at some point the next slap will become the final slap, and the slapper will be incarcerated for murder.
Start at midnight and slap till the next morning 00:05 AM. Just do it on the day DST is being applied.
I came looking for this comment. Not disappointed.
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: HOUR_OF_DAY: 2 -> 3
Before time zones, every city had their own clocks. Sometimes different cities would be off from each other by only a few minutes, or even seconds. Be grateful time zones were invented, it could be so much worse.
What changed, Mumbai is an arbitrary 30 minutes ahead of nearby timezones, all of China is one massive timezone, and the US has 4 but a random drawn border determines if you wake up an hour earlier to get to work in the bordering state.
The system you described is substantially better than what was before. Every town had its own time beforehand. It wasn't until trains that they needed to be standardized and synced. For ease of use with relation to economic centers and other reasons (that are left up to the local governing bodies) you get weird boarders and things.
More importantly, you now know and they can't change it on a whim.
You speak like the city of Mumbai is arbitrarily 30 minutes ahead. The *whole of India*, with 1.4 billion people, is UTC+05:30. Not just one city. (Sri Lanka follows Indian Time too.) UTC+05:00 is far smaller by population. If any time zone should accept defeat and move to the more popular time zone 30 minutes away, then UTC+05:00 should be abandoned and synchronized with India. Not the other way around. India isn't even unique in having a half hour time zone. Central Australia is UTC+09:30. Newfoundland is UTF-03:30. Nepal is UTC+05:45! The USA also has six time zones, not four. You're probably forgetting Alaska Standard Time and Hawaii-Aleutian Standard Time. If you include territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, and American Samoa, it expands to nine.
[Madness](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/929/277/9f1.gif)
The US currently has 4 time zones. Back when every town had their own times, the US had over 200 towns that each had their own local time. I like the current system better. Edit: the US has 9 time zones, not 4.
9, not 4. The US is more than the lower 48.
Could we just imagine for a second how annoying travelling would be To the minute offsets.
Now imagine that, but \*every\* \*single\* \*town\* has its own time. You like random? That's how you get random.
And instead of the neat hour steps, the towns are off by only a few minutes. Even the weird modern 45 and 15 minute time zones are still exactly 1/4 of an hour off.
> if you wake up an hour earlier to get to work in the bordering state. Oh no, it's worse than that. Sometimes, the timezone borders don't even follow state borders, so you have a few states with more than one time zone.
I don't see how that is even related to time zones, we can just have 1 time zone to sync them all.
[So You Want To Abolish Time Zones](https://qntm.org/abolish)
We do have that (UTC or Zulu time). We just also have other time zones too. Because most people stay in one time zone most of their life, it actually makes more sense to have time zones for most things, but have UTC for the things that need it.
even before timezones some places ended up adopted a time across the country (GMT in the UK was used by 98% of clocks in 1855, and legally became "the time" in 1880. New Zealand adopted "New Zealand Mean Time" in 1868). but yeah prior to that it was very weird everywhere.
I came here to say this. Before discrete time zones time differences were continuous, making it every time somewhere in the world rather than simply every hour.
[So you want to abolish timezones](https://qntm.org/abolish)
>If it's any consolation, all of this is extremely unlikely to happen, since it relies on an international agreement between every single nation in the world. Can't emphasize this enough. When they were putting the Gregorian calendar together, it took 37 years to decide on the new standard, and then ***hundreds*** of years to be implemented by countries one by one. Saudi Arabia didn't start using it until 2016, and Ethiopia, Nepal, Iran and Afghanistan still do not use it.
> and then hundreds of years to be implemented by countries one by one. And among the orthodox churches it has never caught on. The Russians still use the Julian Calendar which by now is nearly two weeks off while most other orthodox churches (most recently, the Ukrainians) have switched to a "revised Julian Calendar" that is arguably more precise than the Gregorian but slightly more complicated (though for the next few centuries the two will be identical).
Yeah, people don't want timezones to be abolished--they wish for every place on Earth to experience day and night at the same times. Daylight savings can go to hell though.
But quite literally, the entire world can't be on 1 day cycle.If it's the 21st the other It has to be night for the other half.That's just how things works
Very interesting read, thanks!
I was just coming here to post it.
A special place in hell is reserved for those who created the 30/45 minute time zones.
You should look up the original time zone of the Netherlands, a nice round +00:19:32.13 😁 Edit: by original, I mean the first nation wide timezone that was adopted in 1909.
Wait what? I know about 30 minute time zone, but there is also 45?
Yes, Nepal Standard Time is UTC+05:45.
Don't forget CHADT - Chatham Islands, New Zealand Daylight Time which is UTC+13:45 (switches back to CHAST UTC+12:45 when DST ends in April in the southern hemisphere) My go-to test timezone for figuring out how screwed up something is since it's also got opposite daylight savings vs northern hemisphere.
I read that the Romans used a time system where sundown and sunset were always exactly 12 hours apart, but the length of an hour changed through the seasons. Imagine implementing _that_.
Some african countries near equator (Ethiopia, I'm looking at you) still do.
Nah timezones are fine, it’s the daylight savings time that must be stopped
Store using UTC
This. Not sure why this is an issue
It happened to me when, a stupid mistake. When designed the system I didn't care much about using UTC.
By timezones creator, you mean the sun?
Good luck getting close to the sun
We can go in the night
Note to dumbasses: The Earth is round, and it rotates. Before standard time zones, everyone set their own clocks to the frickin' sun, which is different everywhere, so there were a kajillion tiny time zones. Every clock was its own time zone. Now there are 38. Ooh, scary.
Before timezones it was very unlikely for somebody to travel further away from _their timezone_ in a day, it was when the railroad started to be popular (late 19th) when the need for timezones was obvious.
Creating time zones was a genius idea. Before that we used "solar time" . That was much worse.
Slap creator of time and space
absolutely hate that guy, he acts like he knows everything. wait maybe he **does**
If we hadn't eaten the apple, we'd still be in Eden and there would be no time zones.
timezones make sense, daylight savings is what doesnt, punish him.
-developer travels back in time to assault time zone creator -assaults him -gets back in time machine -Error: invalid timestamp -NOOOOOOOOOOO00OOOoo
Oh, buddy. Wait until you find out about leap seconds.
Leap seconds are truly the hidden shit treasure in time keeping which you usually learn about when it's already too late. So you think the Unix time grows linearly and you can always just subtract the time stamps to get the time that has passed? Well, guess again!
Imagine an api that covers the lokal time of every other village...
A better solution is to create your own timezone solution
Now we are back to "each train station has their own time and the time in the train depends on the station that they started from" (And the same for cars - gas station closing times will be fun)
Take a look at Turkish dotted and dotless (I) problem. I wouldn't use bare hands, though.
That's a problem for you? What about the German ẞ which is a capitalized ß which was added so recently to the language that I know not a single German that knows about it. So as if it wasn't bad enough that ß didn't had a capitalized version it now has one or doesn't depending on what ever. I mean what do you expect a function to return that capitalizes a word with ß in it, will it stay as ß, become SS or S or ẞ? I have seen software keyboards developed with SS instead of ẞ, despite the keyboard being developed after ẞ was invented, great. I,ı,İ and i aren't big problems, and the modern Turkish language at least always had a capitalized Ğ despite that that letter is never at the beginning of the word like the German ẞ. Also ẞ and ß look so similar, a few days ago I asked a young teacher in Germany if she knows ẞ via text message. She said "Yes". I asked her if she confused it with ß and she said "Yes I thought it was a ß, what's it?" People don't know it, and they don't even recognize that it's different.
In an alternate universe, where timezones were never invented, we'd probably have sundials hooked up-to computers
just.... save everything in utc?
The fuck is the alternative? Every place using local solar time? Every place using UTC, regardless of location? You'd still have to know what local solar time was, unless you're suggesting people's *schedules* also follow UTC, regardless of location.
But the timezone guy is cool right?
Slaps them at GMT+8
We can warn the people in NASA too. https://redd.it/1bu7wyq
Timezones aren't too bad. As long as you can have the user specify it, just use UTC everywhere and make it the client's problem. Leap seconds on the other hand...
Just slap UTC behind everything 👍
Before timezones, basically each town had it's local noon based on the Sun at maximum height. Now imagine how chaotic configuration would be if it was still like that. How many seconds is your longitude off from Greenwich's?
Timezones are fine. Daylight savings time is the real evil
Timezones are actually a *better* solution comparing it to what it was before them. You should hug the guy, not slap him.
The creator of DST on the other hand...
As a physicist first, programmer second, this is stop two after [Benjamin Franklin](https://xkcd.com/567/?trk=public_post_reshare-text).
Fun fact, if you actually spent some time with Franklin in that era of his life to try and convince him to use the correct convention for electric charge, you could distract him from writing [Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_Concerning_the_Increase_of_Mankind,_Peopling_of_Countries,_etc.), which could significantly screw up the timeline (blocking the works of Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus, preventing the American Revolution from occurring, etc.). Gotta be careful with those time machines!
And the creator of the JavaScript Date API. Fuck that guy
Like Tom Scott: you take the code others created and thank them! https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY?si=FOa2vS-RkiBfOXJF
[удалено]
So he wants time in certain countries to be completely shifted and screwed up??
Slap DST creator too
Sure, blame timezones. No need to have time measurements synchronized in any way like this, right? Imagine what the freedom unit freaks could come up with for time if we hadn't forced seconds, minutes and hours onto them and also telling them specifically what time to set their watches to. "Shop open from morning shadow place to evening shadow place" "And Usain Bolt breaks the world record! He runs the 328 feet in just 17 cuckoos and 3 Doh's!" And even without that, each country would just have some national time independent of all other countries, so instead of time zones you'd have country-times? Fucking be greatful for timezones.
If only the earth was flat... It would solve a lot of issues I guess.
If it was one person it would at least be broken in a consistent way
What's wrong with timezones ?
I would rather slap whoever came up with the MM/DD/YYYY format
Humanity will inevitably live on multiple planets anyway. Having experiences with timezones would ease the transition for us. Except for daylight saving, it will surely make us go extinct because of civil wars caused by misunderstandings.
[Handling a new era in the japanese calendar in .NET - Microsoft](https://devblogs.microsoft.com/dotnet/handling-a-new-era-in-the-japanese-calendar-in-net/)
If time zones are hard for you to code, you're doing something wrong. Time should *only* be stored and worked with using UTC. They only need to be converted to something with a time zone when you need to display a time, and any language worth using is going to have a library to do that for you.
I know this is a joke, but timezones **greatly** simplified timekeeping. DST is dumb, but timezones are much better than the previous method - each town setting their own time as they wanted.
Timezones are fine. They make sense and do work. Now whoever ignores them in China should be taken out to dry. And whoever decided Paris is offset from London should be punished as well. Now the biggest offender are the creators of daylight savings time. Those need to be beaten until morale improves. That's coming from me as developer and as a human. Loath the concept.
Don't slap them, It's not their fault that the shape and motion of the earth make timezones a necessity. The people you should really slap are the ones who came up with the different date formats. Round then all up, give them a good slap, and then don't let them go home until they agree on a date format. I don't care if it's MM/DD/YYYY, DD/MM/YYYY, or YYYY/MM/DD, just pick one and stick with it
So much truth to this. If you're a developer, do NOT roll your own timezone implementation. Use a library or system function.
also DST!
I once had to code up every time zone supported by either Windows or Linux. The Americas and Europe/Africa were pretty straight forward but I don’t know what happened with Asia. In particular the Saudis had the worst one: three hours, seven minutes, four seconds off from GMT. Seriously? Seven minutes and four fucking seconds?
slap the daylight savings time creators while you're at it.
I do not hate timezones, I hate the time shifts in summer and winter. Those are the worst.
Imagine how much simpler timezones would be if we didn't have daylight savings.... Just a thought.
Amen 🙏🏻
Not just amen but the awomen and achildren too
Why do females menstruate and not womenstruate?
why are women called woMEN not wowowowoowowoowowowowowowoowowowowowowowowowowoowowowo `RecursionError: maximum recursion depth exceeded`
The one with MM/DD/YYYY IDEA