3 ms·
On the other hand, you have regions such as Spain (which should be UTC-1, but is, like the rest of continental Europe, UTC+1), or even China (where the western
by kuschku 9y ago
On the other hand, you have regions such as Spain (which should be UTC-1, but is, like the rest of continental Europe, UTC+1), or even China (where the western border of China is 5 hours offset to neighboring countries).
Obviously, this means that you can’t rely on timezones to determine business times.
And then there’s cultural differences, in some countries people will eat dinner between 21:00 and 22:00, in others around 18:00 – this has obvious consequences for business dinners.
- davidmr 9y agoI did say that there were edge cases. Is encoding no regional information in local time better than encoding some that works pretty well in many common cases?
- pedroaraujo 9y agoWhile timezones are not 100% reliable, they still provide us with a pretty good picture of the state in the region you want to know the time for. The problems you describe are due to cultural mismatches and these can't really be solved by any other system.
- kuschku 9y agoThe danger of a leaky abstraction is that the leaky abstraction makes it easy to ignore the edge cases, and then when you have to handle them, they come as a surprise.
- tincholio 9y ago> Obviously, this means that you can’t rely on timezones to determine business times. Of course you can, you just need to know in which timezone they are (except for the China case, maybe).