this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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Aren't time zones quite straightforward? You add a whole number of hours and for some a half. Compare that to a sundial on the one side and having times that don't match your day at all on the other, I'd say it's good
Or three quarters in a few cases.
And of course there are cases where countries spanning as many as 5 "ideal" time zones (dividing the globe into 24 equal slices) actually use a single time zone.
And then when someone tells you the meeting is at 10:00 am, you have to figure out if they mean your time zone or theirs, and if they mean theirs, you then have to convert that to yours. Oh, but your conversion was wrong because one of you went into or out of daylight saving time between the day when you did the conversion and when the meeting took place.
But what is the alternative? Sure, fck daylight saving. Having the date changed at noon is fucked up, too, and that's what happens if you agree to one global time. And having countries that are too big for a time zone is fucked up as well. Russia for example actually only spans to the Ural mountains, everything to the east are colonies. Fuck states in general #nobordersnonations
I personally would prefer if we all used UTC. My working hours would be 23:00 to 07:00. A Brits working hours would be 09:00 to 17:00, and a New Yorker would work 13:00 to 21:00.
But this does have its own drawbacks. Personally I just think those drawbacks, in the sorts of real-world time-related conversations I've had, are less than the drawbacks of dealing with varying time zones.
But yeah, the biggest factor is daylight saving time. Doing away with it is the number one option places that use it should take, regardless of whether one advocates for abolishing time zones or not.
Normie. Real timezone-haters use Unix epoch. /s
im a proponent of using exclusively UTC for anything pertinent to being accurate, and then using local solar time (the sun) to refer to everything else, it has the benefit of making people look outside anyway.
The drawbacks are many and the benefits are few.
Watching foreign films would be a pain, where is this in the world again, what does 19:00 mean for them? More exposition, or you just have to guess based on languag and accent.
I need this work done by our team in XYZ country, what are their working hours? (wow, look at that, still using timezones?)
When you arrive somewhere on holiday, now you have to get a sense of the time there. Or continually be thinking "what's that in my home time?/what's that in solar time", which is why solar time just makes more sense.
People aren't going to stop thinking in solar time, ever. We're hard-wired to be awake with the sun. It doesn't matter what the numbers are, you will associate them with the sun. The question then becomes, would we rather all use roughly the same numbers (timezones, what we currently have), or different numbers (everyone using UTC).
Using UTC solves only 1 problem, you can say verbally to someone across the world, let's make the meeting 15:00 - but this is already easily solved by using a calendar which converts for you...
There's a reason we have never used a single non-solar time, it's just worse and I think there's a reason these posts always end up on programmer focused places on the internet. Yes, I'm sure their job is annoying, and it would be easier to not have to solve time conversion problems, but the time conversion problems wouldn't even go away if you forced everyone to use UTC. You'd just start having to do conversions to solar time, or looking up waking hours (which is just timezones)
This is a solved problem.
Which is short sighted considering it is much easier to make a standardized library for converting time zones than it is to make a standard library reflecting what different time numbers mean in different places around the world. If they somehow convinced people to make the change, they would find out pretty quickly they were better off with the devil they knew.
I agree planning around it is stupid, but I don't see how that affects computer programs.
(let me clarify, this seems like an everyone-issue, rather than a developer-issue)
IMO the problem for developers is that they have to provide general solutions, so they have to cover each case all the time instead of just a singular case at a time.
you have to program a meeting that reoccurs between DST observant & non observant states in the US and australia.
Good luck.
I hate to repeat myself but DST is garbage. I never said it's good
It's not always whole hours
To be fair, they did say "and for some a half".
Though that misses the Kathmandu, Eucla, and Chatham Islands, which are all :45.
Not if the place doesn't do daylight savings time, and not all places in a timezone will do that (least in North America) so you need extra code if they do or do not. It becomes a pain after awhile when you do it in multiple projects. Technically one extra setting but it's still a pain to make sure it's handle properly in all cases, especially when the previous programmer decided to handle it for each case individually, but that's a different issue.
Also when you deal with the times, say in .Net you gotta make sure it's the proper kind of date otherwise it decides it's a local system date and will change it to system local when run. Sure it's all handled but there are many easy mistakes to make when working with time.
I probably didn't even get to the real reason, I sort of picked this up on my own.
Sounds like daylight saving is the bigger issue. Maybe not bigger but when you compare cost and benefit. I think the US uses even different start and end dates than the EU and I don't know about the rest of the world
Yeah the US differs by a couple of weeks iirc
oh you sweet summer child, what you don't know is going to come back to haunt you forever.
Obligatory video when it comes to time zones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY