It seems to me like Joel has a rather warped view of how software should be built. He claims It means you have to rewrite all of your date display and parsing

It seems to me like Joel has a rather warped view of how software should be built. He claims It means you have to rewrite all of your date display and parsing code to handle both epochs. That would take several days to implement, I think. That's just ridiculous. In my mind, you need a piece of code that reads the 1904 record and sets a flag in the code. Then, your date display and parsing code should all call one, or maybe two, functions which handle the conversion for you based on this flag. Thus, supporting two different epochs requires at most three components: one to read it and set a flag, one to convert a numerical argument to a date based on that flag, and one to convert a date back to a numerical argument (again, based on the flag). Should this really take "several days to implement"? It seems to me that an hour should be plenty of time. It's going to be hard for me to continue to take him seriously if this is his view of how software should be built.