4 ms·
your colleague is in sorta-ish good company, considering that nearly every famous mathematician alive during the French Revolution was advocating for some form
by ChainOfFools 4y ago
your colleague is in sorta-ish good company, considering that nearly every famous mathematician alive during the French Revolution was advocating for some form of time comparable to the metric standard [0], using base 10 instead of 12 or 60. They were making the 18th century equivalent to the utc standardization argument today. And arguably on similarly sensible grounds that it made basic clock math slightly less exposed to simple error.
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time?wprov=sfla1
- tablespoon 4y ago> your colleague is in sorta-ish good company Not really. He was making a pretty serious error of not really understanding the "users," prioritizing his esoteric concerns over arguably more important ones, essentially forcing his users to serve his system instead of building the system for them.
- ChainOfFools 4y ago"if i asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." - Henry Ford
- tablespoon 4y ago> "if i asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." - Henry Ford I think a more apropos Ford quote would be the "you can have any color you want, as long as it's black," but that still doesn't capture it. It's one thing to present something that meets the needs of your customers that they didn't anticipate, it's quite another to ignore those needs and just force the thing you want on them at great cost. He was only concerned with software engineers writing less time conversion logic, and cherry-picking to try to justify that idea. If you think about it, the whole thing is crazy and backwards, given how people use time 99% of the time and who is better at arithmetic.