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Related thread from 10 months ago, about a MSDN article titled "The Japanese Calendar’s Y2K Moment" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17430085 https://news.

by danso 8y ago

Related thread from 10 months ago, about a MSDN article titled "The Japanese Calendar’s Y2K Moment" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17430085 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17430085 From the MSDN article: > The Japanese Calendar has Japanese Era Names that coincide with the reign of the Emperor. For most of the modern age of computing that has been the Heisei era, however the Emperor is expected to step down on April 30, 2019. Which will bring about the beginning of a new era. Fortunately, this is a rare event, however it means that most software has not been tested to ensure that it will behave with an additional era. > The magnitude of this event on computing systems using the Japanese Calendar may be similar to the Y2K event with the Gregorian Calendar. For the Y2K event, there was world-wide recognition of the upcoming change, resulting in governments and software vendors beginning to work on solutions for that problem several years before 1 Jan 2000. Even with that preparation many organizations encountered problems due to the millennial transition. I swear there was an HN thread about a language-specific implementation (Java? Ruby?) of calendar, which included having to deal with the Japanese epoch change.

FanaHOVA 8y ago
Ruby 2.6.3 added support for the Japanese new era last week. You can see the ruby-lang thread here [0]. [0] https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/15742 https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/15742
- ChrisArchitect 8y ago
  a good digital example of the last minute waiting til the name had been announced -- this issue only submitted on april 1
PeterisP 8y ago
A big issue is that people couldn't finalize any changes until the new era name had been decided and announced, which happened just a few weeks ago on April 1. For things like Y2K, you could have done your deployment and testing long before it happened - for this change, everyone has just this one month to wait for any vendors involved to finalize, test and distribute their updates so that they can start deploying them on their own systems. No programming language or calendar library version older than March 31, 2019 could include proper support for Japanese dates of May.
- danso 8y ago
  > A big issue is that people couldn't finalize any changes until the new era name had been decided and announced, which happened just a few weeks ago on April 1. Yeah, I was wondering about this line in the article: > Officials compounded the problem by keeping the new era’s name secret until April 1, just one month before the transition. Is there any reason, specific to Japanese tradition/convention/bureaucracy to keep the name of the era secret until one month before the actual change? When is the era name actually decided on, and how soon after the abdication of the current emperor?
  - alexmlamb2 8y ago
    "Is there any reason, specific to Japanese tradition/convention/bureaucracy to keep the name of the era secret until one month before the actual change?" Yes.
  - kryptiskt 8y ago
    The era name was decided by the government a couple of weeks before the announcement. Announcing a month in advance was a concession, conservative politicians wanted it like it always has been done, that the name is revealed at the start of the era.
    - SiVal 8y ago
      I had to deal with the previous transition, and that one was going to be the result of the death of the emperor. Therefore, software was not allowed to include any provision for transition to a new date system, because doing so would imply that the emperor might die someday, which was strictly forbidden. I don't know whether it was an actual law, but there was zero tolerance for including any provision for changing the Showa date system. As a foreign (non-Japanese) company, we just used the western-style date almost everywhere except for published documents to skirt this problem. Doing the wrong Japanese thing would have earned us serious hostility from the Japanese business press, but foreigners doing dates the foreign way would tolerated as mere foreignness.
  - ken 8y ago
Kinnard 8y ago
So they don't use unix time?
james_s_tayler 8y ago
Yeah, probably Java. Here's the relevant info. https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/a-new-japanese-era-for-java https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/a-new-japanese-...

by danso 8y ago

FanaHOVA 8y ago

Ruby 2.6.3 added support for the Japanese new era last week. You can see the ruby-lang thread here [0]. [0] https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/15742 https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/15742

ChrisArchitect 8y ago
a good digital example of the last minute waiting til the name had been announced -- this issue only submitted on april 1

PeterisP 8y ago

A big issue is that people couldn't finalize any changes until the new era name had been decided and announced, which happened just a few weeks ago on April 1. For things like Y2K, you could have done your deployment and testing long before it happened - for this change, everyone has just this one month to wait for any vendors involved to finalize, test and distribute their updates so that they can start deploying them on their own systems. No programming language or calendar library version older than March 31, 2019 could include proper support for Japanese dates of May.

danso 8y ago
> A big issue is that people couldn't finalize any changes until the new era name had been decided and announced, which happened just a few weeks ago on April 1. Yeah, I was wondering about this line in the article: > Officials compounded the problem by keeping the new era’s name secret until April 1, just one month before the transition. Is there any reason, specific to Japanese tradition/convention/bureaucracy to keep the name of the era secret until one month before the actual change? When is the era name actually decided on, and how soon after the abdication of the current emperor?
- alexmlamb2 8y ago
  "Is there any reason, specific to Japanese tradition/convention/bureaucracy to keep the name of the era secret until one month before the actual change?" Yes.
- kryptiskt 8y ago
  The era name was decided by the government a couple of weeks before the announcement. Announcing a month in advance was a concession, conservative politicians wanted it like it always has been done, that the name is revealed at the start of the era.
  - SiVal 8y ago
    I had to deal with the previous transition, and that one was going to be the result of the death of the emperor. Therefore, software was not allowed to include any provision for transition to a new date system, because doing so would imply that the emperor might die someday, which was strictly forbidden. I don't know whether it was an actual law, but there was zero tolerance for including any provision for changing the Showa date system. As a foreign (non-Japanese) company, we just used the western-style date almost everywhere except for published documents to skirt this problem. Doing the wrong Japanese thing would have earned us serious hostility from the Japanese business press, but foreigners doing dates the foreign way would tolerated as mere foreignness.
- ken 8y ago

Kinnard 8y ago

So they don't use unix time?

james_s_tayler 8y ago

Yeah, probably Java. Here's the relevant info. https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/a-new-japanese-era-for-java https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/a-new-japanese-...