I’d be happy if the whole planet had the same timezone. Just adjust your personal life to global time, rather than expecting time to adjust to anyone’s work/school timetable.
As a programmer I would love that. But as a person it does make more sense to go “it’s 4am in California, that person is probably sleeping” than “it’s 11am, what is the sun situation like in California rn?”
The best counter point I’ve heard for it is that a date change would happen in the middle of the work day for half the world. That does sound tough to deal with
How about ‘the majority of businesses, offices, and people are active from 8-10 or whatever, so when my plane lands at 11:00 am in Tokyo, I can be reasonably confident that I will be able to do standard human business things’ versus, what time does Tokyo wake up?
Also every city and even neighborhoods would end up disjointed and on their own system since even just a few miles can make a big difference on when the sun sets and rises.
Timezones were made specifically to link people that were geographically far apart, we had a time before time zones, and people missed their trains all the time because 9pm meant something to pretty much every single person.
I am one of the people with unusual sleep schedules. If you know someone well enough to know their personal timezone then you can use that regardless. It’s still useful to know the hours a country usually operates in.
As a programmer who works with people on both side of the pond, it often doesn’t matter what time it is there, as they’re not necessarily working standard hours anyway. They have families and errands and choose to work overnight essentially at random, so we’ve adapted to communicating asynchronously for 90% of our work.
Any 24-hour period will always begin and end in the same day (or week, or month).
A week always begins and ends in the same month.
A week (or a month) always begins and ends in the same year.
The machine that a program runs on will always be in the GMT time zone.
Ok, that’s not true. But at least the time zone in which a program has to run will never change.
Well, surely there will never be a change to the time zone in which a program hast to run in production.
The system clock will always be set to the correct local time.
The system clock will always be set to a time that is not wildly different from the correct local time.
If the system clock is incorrect, it will at least always be off by a consistent number of seconds.
The server clock and the client clock will always be set to the same time.
The server clock and the client clock will always be set to around the same time.
Ok, but the time on the server clock and time on the client clock would never be different by a matter of decades.
If the server clock and the client clock are not in synch, they will at least always be out of synch by a consistent number of seconds.
The server clock and the client clock will use the same time zone.
The system clock will never be set to a time that is in the distant past or the far future.
Time has no beginning and no end.
One minute on the system clock has exactly the same duration as one minute on any other clock
Ok, but the duration of one minute on the system clock will be pretty close to the duration of one minute on most other clocks.
Fine, but the duration of one minute on the system clock would never be more than an hour.
The smallest unit of time is one second.
Ok, one millisecond.
It will never be necessary to set the system time to any value other than the correct local time.
Ok, testing might require setting the system time to a value other than the correct local time but it will never be necessary to do so in production.
Time stamps will always be specified in a commonly-understood format like 1339972628 or 133997262837.
Time stamps will always be specified in the same format.
Time stamps will always have the same level of precision.
A time stamp of sufficient precision can safely be considered unique.
A timestamp represents the time that an event actually occurred.
Human-readable dates can be specified in universally understood formats such as 05/07/11.
The offsets between two time zones will remain constant.
OK, historical oddities aside, the offsets between two time zones won’t change in the future.
Changes in the offsets between time zones will occur with plenty of advance notice.
Daylight saving time happens at the same time every year.
Daylight saving time happens at the same time in every time zone.
Daylight saving time always adjusts by an hour.
Months have either 28, 29, 30, or 31 days.
The day of the month always advances contiguously from N to either N+1 or 1, with no discontinuities.
There is only one calendar system in use at one time.
There is a leap year every year divisible by 4.
Non leap years will never contain a leap day.
It will be easy to calculate the duration of x number of hours and minutes from a particular point in time.
The same month has the same number of days in it everywhere!
Unix time is completely ignorant about anything except seconds.
Unix time is the number of seconds since Jan 1st 1970.
The day before Saturday is always Friday.
Contiguous timezones are no more than an hour apart. (aka we don’t need to test what happens to the avionics when you fly over the International Date Line)
Two timezones that differ will differ by an integer number of half hours.
Okay, quarter hours.
Okay, seconds, but it will be a consistent difference if we ignore DST.
If you create two date objects right beside each other, they’ll represent the same time. (a fantastic Heisenbug generator)
You can wait for the clock to reach exactly HH:MM:SS by sampling once a second.
If a process runs for n seconds and then terminates, approximately nseconds will have elapsed on the system clock at the time of termination.
Weeks start on Monday.
Days begin in the morning.
Holidays span an integer number of whole days.
The weekend consists of Saturday and Sunday.
It’s possible to establish a total ordering on timestamps that is useful outside your system.
The local time offset (from UTC) will not change during office hours.
Thread.sleep(1000) sleeps for 1000 milliseconds.
Thread.sleep(1000) sleeps for >=1000 milliseconds.
There are 60 seconds in every minute.
Timestamps always advance monotonically.
GMT and UTC are the same timezone.
Britain uses GMT.
Time always goes forwards.
The difference between the current time and one week from the current time is always 7 * 86400 seconds.
The difference between two timestamps is an accurate measure of the time that elapsed between them.
24:12:34 is a invalid time.
Every integer is a theoretical possible year.
If you display a datetime, the displayed time has the same second part as the stored time,
Or the same year,
But at least the numerical difference between the displayed and stored year will be less than 2.
If you have a date in a correct YYYY-MM-DD format, the year consists of four characters.
If you merge two dates, by taking the month from the first and the day/year from the second, you get a valid date.
But it will work, if both years are leap years
If you take a w3c published algorithm for adding durations to dates, it will work in all cases.
The standard library supports negative years and years above 10000.
Time zones always differ by a whole hour.
If you convert a timestamp with millisecond precision to a date time with second precision, you can safely ignore the millisecond fractions.
But you can ignore the millisecond fraction, if it is less than 0.5.
Two-digit years should be somewhere in the range 1900-2099.
If you parse a date time, you can read the numbers character for character, without needing to backtrack.
But if you print a date time, you can write the numbers character for character, without needing to backtrack.
You will never have to parse a format like ---12Z or P12Y34M56DT78H90M12.345S.
There are only 24 time zones.
Time zones are always whole hours away from UTC.
Daylight Saving Time (DST) starts/ends on the same date everywhere.
DST is always an advancement by 1 hour.
Reading the client’s clock and comparing to UTC is a good way to determine their timezone.
The software stack will/won’t try to automatically adjust for timezone/DST.
My software is only used internally/locally, so I don’t have to worry about timezones.
My software stack will handle it without me needing to do anything special.
I can easily maintain a timezone list myself.
All measurements of time on a given clock will occur within the same frame of reference.
The fact that a date-based function works now means it will work on any date.
Years have 365 or 366 days.
Each calendar date is followed by the next in sequence, without skipping.
A given date and/or time unambiguously identifies a unique moment.
Leap years occur every 4 years.
You can determine the time zone from the state/province.
You can determine the time zone from the city/town.
Time passes at the same speed on top of a mountain and at the bottom of a valley.
One hour is as long as the next in all time systems.
You can calculate when leap seconds will be added.
The precision of the data type returned by a getCurrentTime()function is the same as the precision of that function.
Two subsequent calls to a getCurrentTime() function will return distinct results.
The second of two subsequent calls to a getCurrentTime() function will return a larger result.
The software will never run on a space ship that is orbiting a black hole.
I’d be happy if the whole planet had the same timezone. Just adjust your personal life to global time, rather than expecting time to adjust to anyone’s work/school timetable.
As a programmer I would love that. But as a person it does make more sense to go “it’s 4am in California, that person is probably sleeping” than “it’s 11am, what is the sun situation like in California rn?”
The best counter point I’ve heard for it is that a date change would happen in the middle of the work day for half the world. That does sound tough to deal with
Just abolish dates and use Unix Timestamp for everything.
“See you this evening at 1728326925, okay?”
And abolish celebrating birthdays too?
No, you can celebrate your Arch installation anniversary once every thirty million seconds.
Considering that there are quite a few people with unusual sleep and/or work schedules that doesn’t help nearly as much as you would think.
How about ‘the majority of businesses, offices, and people are active from 8-10 or whatever, so when my plane lands at 11:00 am in Tokyo, I can be reasonably confident that I will be able to do standard human business things’ versus, what time does Tokyo wake up?
Also every city and even neighborhoods would end up disjointed and on their own system since even just a few miles can make a big difference on when the sun sets and rises.
Timezones were made specifically to link people that were geographically far apart, we had a time before time zones, and people missed their trains all the time because 9pm meant something to pretty much every single person.
Nobody is suggesting going back to a system where every little place has their own time. I am talking about having a single time for the entire world.
I am one of the people with unusual sleep schedules. If you know someone well enough to know their personal timezone then you can use that regardless. It’s still useful to know the hours a country usually operates in.
As a programmer who works with people on both side of the pond, it often doesn’t matter what time it is there, as they’re not necessarily working standard hours anyway. They have families and errands and choose to work overnight essentially at random, so we’ve adapted to communicating asynchronously for 90% of our work.
I’ve read we would all compensate in ways that would essentially bring back time zones.
Reminded me of this:
Falsehoods programmers believe about time
short list
Nope I lied
GMTtime zone.1339972628or133997262837.05/07/11.Nto eitherN+1or1, with no discontinuities.DST.HH:MM:SSby sampling once a second.nseconds and then terminates, approximatelynseconds will have elapsed on the system clock at the time of termination.UTC) will not change during office hours.Thread.sleep(1000)sleeps for 1000 milliseconds.Thread.sleep(1000)sleeps for>=1000 milliseconds.GMTandUTCare the same timezone.GMT.7 * 86400seconds.24:12:34is a invalid time.YYYY-MM-DDformat, the year consists of four characters.---12ZorP12Y34M56DT78H90M12.345S.getCurrentTime()function is the same as the precision of that function.getCurrentTime()function will return distinct results.getCurrentTime()function will return a larger result.