It seems that Y2K was mostly painful because tons of data interchange formats specified two-digit years and fixing it meant getting it fixed at all endpoints at

It seems that Y2K was mostly painful because tons of data interchange formats specified two-digit years and fixing it meant getting it fixed at all endpoints at the same time. Basically beginning with XML in the 1990s, the "modern world" is rapidly converging on accepting full, textual dates (preferably in one of the ISO 8601 formats) in any but the most private and short-lived of formats (protobufs and the like). These textual formats are obviously not vulnerable to the 2038 issue, so preparing for 2038 will be significantly easier, as it can be done unilaterally, without all the coordination overhead.