Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
My take:
Daylight savings = bad
Time zones = good
If everyone had the same clock time, we would need to know when it was morning, midday and evening for people in other locations. Scheduling stuff between locations would still suck, but it would suck differently.
Yeah but it could be improved by not using arbitrary country-decided timezones and instead simply listing "diurnal time", basically. And then clocks could get normalized as always showing UTC nearby, too. For communication.
That's not reasonable at all. The purpose of time is to help organize society across distance. The purpose of states/countries/administrative districts is to help organize society within a similar geographical region. It is entirely reasonable for timezones to conform to political boundaries.
I don't know about that, it seems like one of the things that makes the world simple for programmers and complex for everyone else. It doesn't allow for large countries to split along sensible political boundaries. So if one boundary slices through the middle of New York City, too bad. Moving boundaries to instead be at state/province/etc boundaries or in the middle of nowhere like we usually see now seems more sensible.
Store times in UTC, convert in UI to locale's timezone with one of any of the millions of timezone libraries. If you're storing in local time, you're gonna have a bad time.
It depends. If something needs to happen in local time (like, always at the same time regardless of daylights savings for example) you should be storing times in local timezone
Store in UTC with the tz offset and if you're using a modern tz library, that should handle it for you.
tz offset is really not enough. You'd need to save the time zone id and/or offset, to have you library calculate deviations such as daylight savings.
Even that, that would break if the user moves and now what they setup is using their previous timezone.
Basically, I'm saying that storing the offset works most of the time, but not all of the time.
Yeah that's true, tzid is probably better than just a straight offset, that's probably what I was thinking but it was late when I posted lol. And the user moving is really more an issue of making updating that accessible imo
Timestamp in UTC
But for time of day, use local time and store separate column with the timezone name. Don't use timezone offsets since that doesn't work with DST. You're better off with something like America/New_York because God knows what 2030 will look like.
And if timezone are abolished, or DST, that's even more reason to store the timezone name.
Yes that's true, I just go by whatever ISO standard
Yeah but good luck time traveling to the right moment to catch that guy.
“Oh him? He was here three hours ago”
Even worse. Daylight savings creators. I work in manufacturing and we literally stut down the production line for an hour during the "fall back" and "spring ahead" so we can manually change the time on every computer.
Sounds like fun time
Does it matter if those machines are an hour out for 6 months? Why not just keep them on UTC as a rule?
For quality control it did. The real concern is people messing up time. If there was a quality complaint we wanted it to be easy for people to go back thru production data. A lot of the people operating the machinery and performing quality checks at our facility are not well educated, and the need is there to make investigating quality tasks/entering quality data very easy.
thru
I'd hate to see people cutting corners.
Thru is the USA spelling. There's nothing wrong with using it.
I interpreted the typo as strut instead of shut at first and it was way funnier that way
At least we don't use the Roman method of varied hour lengths depending in the time of day and times of year.
Wasn't it the railroads at the end of the 19th century? Yeah... they would kick our asses.
What about time on a different planet? What would be a common time"zone" for Mars and Earth?
I'd do this to all the guys who introduced different charsets.
Time is possibly one of the hardest things to handle properly for a coder. There's plenty of hard problems (network loss, 3 phase commits, etc), but time stand out as really annoying.
Another one is colors. All it takes is one library to encode colors in a weird way and then mapping them between libraries is a mess.
Time is annoying, but it's mostly solved. The problem is people don't use the solutions and make their own things that don't actually work.
Without time zones it would be worse. Every little town would have their own time, calculated from their position
At least then everyone would be thinking about it and using UTC, not writing their programs to rely on the timezone always being the same
It's too easy a problem to ignore/overlook right now
I agree, UTC for global is fine, might as well just do localized time as
Sun-up, 1st hour of the day, ,2nd, 3rd... Sunset for locale
For the afternoon We could count the hours until sunset
Nice. LOL
Quality joke, right here.
Leap year creator has left the chat & blocked.......
TBH leap year is needed because of the ~0.25 day error in the Earth's revolution around the sun.
Leap year creator
That's Julius Caesar. Sort of...
We'll round up the DST people right after we eradicate this kid-pidgin, rounding up the 'u' and the 'r' indolents.
Let's grab the people who don't know 'will' from 'would', as well. No child left behind.
Average IQ in America will skyrocket.
Yeah, screw Kaiser William.