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Very nice write up! But I think your point that time doesn't need to be a mess is refuted by all the points you made. I know you had to limit the length of th

Very nice write up! But I think your point that time doesn't need to be a mess is refuted by all the points you made. I know you had to limit the length of the post, but time is an interest of mine, so here's a couple more points you may find interesting: UTC is not an acronym. The story I heard was the English acronym would be "CUT" (the name is "coordinated universal time") and the French complained, the French acronym would be "TUC" and the English-speaking committee members complained, so they settled for something that wasn't pronouncable in either. (FYI, "ISO" isn't an acronym either!) Leap seconds caused such havoc (especially in data centers) that no further leap seconds will be used. (What will happen in the future is anyone's guess.) But for now, you can rest easy and ignore them. I have a short list of time (and NTP) related links at <https://wpollock.com/Cts2322.htm#NTP https://wpollock.com/Cts2322.htm#NTP>.

shan_rauf 1y ago
> I think your point that time doesn't need to be a mess is refuted by all the points you made (author of the post here) LOL you're right... I think I understated the complexity because I was trying hard to emphasize how people focus on the wrong places for complexity: For example, when I was learning about the topic myself, particularly around civil time and timezones, I read so many posts that list timezone rule changes as evidence of complexity, or they'll say "look at these programmer falsehoods about time" even though you can encapsulate practically all of those examples with the higher level mental model that "you can't have a generalized rule to predict civil time for all regions of Earth at all points in history, but it's mostly fine after 1970 because of the IANA database, which makes knowing what UTC offset to use a simple lookup; no need to stress about these specific timezone rule changes if you use this higher level mental model". And then the actual complexity (which may not even matter for many programs) is around questions like "How do I handle non-existent/ambiguous civil times" or "How do I handle future time rule changes" and what not. Btw thank you for the links!

shan_rauf 1y ago

> I think your point that time doesn't need to be a mess is refuted by all the points you made (author of the post here) LOL you're right... I think I understated the complexity because I was trying hard to emphasize how people focus on the wrong places for complexity: For example, when I was learning about the topic myself, particularly around civil time and timezones, I read so many posts that list timezone rule changes as evidence of complexity, or they'll say "look at these programmer falsehoods about time" even though you can encapsulate practically all of those examples with the higher level mental model that "you can't have a generalized rule to predict civil time for all regions of Earth at all points in history, but it's mostly fine after 1970 because of the IANA database, which makes knowing what UTC offset to use a simple lookup; no need to stress about these specific timezone rule changes if you use this higher level mental model". And then the actual complexity (which may not even matter for many programs) is around questions like "How do I handle non-existent/ambiguous civil times" or "How do I handle future time rule changes" and what not. Btw thank you for the links!