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Things like this are why programmers can't have nice things. Cultural historical oddities make for fun facts and an enormous amount of added complexity. When I

Things like this are why programmers can't have nice things. Cultural historical oddities make for fun facts and an enormous amount of added complexity. When I propose wacky, implausible ideas to friends like "a single world-wide time zone" or "replacing all writing with the international phonetic alphabet", the idea is to reduce things that make the technical debt for supporting the whole world enormous. As it is, English programmers are frankly, most likely to make things that only work for English speakers. And then the technical debt of supporting Latin alphabets and US time zones and all the like multiply together. We should be thankful as much of the world adopted UTF8 and UTC as early as it did, but I don't envy anyone who has to work with systems that don't have good support for internationalization. Those people are in a terrible position, and with legacy systems, they might have to implement a terribly complex set of rules that are taken for granted by most people, and sometimes not even explicitly written down anywhere outside obscure papers on the topics. Someone mentioned the current year in the Nepali calendar is 2071. So now you know, if you want to appropriately support customers in Nepal, you might want to support their calendar. But I don't know enough about Nepal to say whether or not anyone does. The Wikipedia page List of calendars is, frankly, a bit terrifying[1]. The fundamental problems of these fun cultural artifacts is the technical debt for old systems and the barrier to entry for new systems. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_calendars#In_use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_calendars#In_use

_almosnow 12y ago
>"a single world-wide time zone" or "replacing all writing with the international phonetic alphabet" Just wow man, you are taking lazyness to a whole new level.
- minot 12y ago
  I'd go to bed at 7 AM and wake up at 1 PM. A regular nine to five job would be 3 PM to 11 PM. I, personally, have pretty much no social life so it wouldn't affect me that much if we had to work nine hundred hours to seventeen hundred hours UTC while living in central time zone (UTC - 6:00). I'd imagine we'd burn up a lot more fuel if everyone worked nights and slept days though. Also, I read somewhere that access to sunlight (or lack thereof) can alter people's emotional state.
  - Arnavion 12y ago
    A single timezone for the whole world made much more sense in Asimov's Robot novels. But that was because everyone lived underground or in domed cities (I forget which), so they didn't care about the position of the sun and woke up / went to bed at the same time globally.
dyadic 12y ago
"a single world-wide time zone", Yes. As someone who works with clients in different parts of the world I really do long for a single time zone that we can all share. In local life will 12 noon will always be the ~same time, but for business I don't care. Usually I try to use UTC, but it's not always successful, and just trying to pin down a suitable time to speak to someone across timezones can be difficult. --- However, "replacing all writing with the international phonetic alphabet" is a terrible idea
- thanksgiving 12y ago
  > However, "replacing all writing with the international phonetic alphabet" is a terrible idea What if we could dissociate spoken language from written language? We could just use the 26 letters in English to write everything. This could allow Romanization of everything without those pesky accent marks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese
  - dyadic 12y ago
    Perhaps I should have expanded on why writing a spoken language as IPA is a bad idea. Language is fluid and always changing, if you start to spell words using the IPA then you need variations for every different accent and you need to update the spelling as accents change over time. Words have almost always been written down as they sound, but then the way that we say them changes. Some changes in written language happen, an obvious contemporary example being the differences between UK English and US English. But writing in IPA would mean that we need to update our written texts as our language change or it would mean that every person has to speak it the same way and in every location forever, and that you need to police it so people don't speak incorrectly.
azernik 12y ago
Once you've built a system that understands timezones and offsets from UTC, does it really add all that much complexity to support offsets that are not whole multiples of half hours or hours?
- riobard 12y ago
  "Once you've built a system that understands timezones and offsets from UTC" I think that's the point he's complaining about: it's damn hard to build such a system because of the artificially induced complexity.
  - brudgers 12y ago
    It's the simplicity that's artificial. Noon is a local event that occurs when the sun is due south. Timezones and standardized times are the abstractions.
    - dragonwriter 12y ago
      > Noon is a local event that occurs when the sun is due south. "When the sun lies neither east nor west of a particular point on the surface of the Earth." At least, if you want "noon" to be something that happens everywhere on Earth.
      - dllthomas 12y ago
        Everywhere but two points, anyway...
    - icebraining 12y ago
      But the "natural noon" you described is more simple than the timezones with DST that might or might not happen depending on who was elected locally and nationally. A system where noon is regulated by a single, immutable equation describing the position of the Earth vis-à-vis the Sun would be much easier to implement.
wpietri 12y ago
The entire point of computers is to make things easier for people. If you want to force people to conform to make things easier for computers, you've got it exactly backwards.
jasoncartwright 12y ago
Swatch tried "Internet Time", which was also decimal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
evanb 12y ago
Having a global timezone is not quite so easy for people's brains, either: About half of everybody will live in a place where the day changes in the middle of the... day, for the lack of a better expression. [The first day is the calendar day, the second is the solar day.]
PinguTS 12y ago
It seems you never have been abroad. Go out and explore the world yourself. The is not for fun facts. It is history and where people live. Nobody wants one time zone, because nobody wants to wake up at 8pm and go to work and such things. That is the reason why we have time zones. You know what, computers are pretty good in crunching numbers. So it is an easy task for them to do time shifts based on time zones. My iPhone is pretty good with it. I didn't had to adjust anything, when I visited Nepal and India for the last 5 years. The same is with languages. Just try to learn another human language and not a computer language. It is much more joy. The problem with these things only people have, which never experienced the world, their diversity, their history. There are so much things to discover about the world and yourself while experiencing the world.
lcedp 12y ago
1/ A single world-wide time zone won't work as I think you think it will work. At least while we care about daylight. Imagine you need to know what are business hours for someone in other region. E.g. you business hours could start at +9 single world-wide time zone, but other person's hours start at +23 SWWTZ. You are back at having timezones. 1.1/ Besides, we do have UTC. And people already use it for coordination of global events. 2/ Substituting writing system with IPA will break a lot of languages. Especially Chinese. English will branch out into dozen hardly interchangeable writing variants. With time it will get worse.

_almosnow 12y ago

>"a single world-wide time zone" or "replacing all writing with the international phonetic alphabet" Just wow man, you are taking lazyness to a whole new level.

minot 12y ago
I'd go to bed at 7 AM and wake up at 1 PM. A regular nine to five job would be 3 PM to 11 PM. I, personally, have pretty much no social life so it wouldn't affect me that much if we had to work nine hundred hours to seventeen hundred hours UTC while living in central time zone (UTC - 6:00). I'd imagine we'd burn up a lot more fuel if everyone worked nights and slept days though. Also, I read somewhere that access to sunlight (or lack thereof) can alter people's emotional state.
- Arnavion 12y ago
  A single timezone for the whole world made much more sense in Asimov's Robot novels. But that was because everyone lived underground or in domed cities (I forget which), so they didn't care about the position of the sun and woke up / went to bed at the same time globally.

dyadic 12y ago

"a single world-wide time zone", Yes. As someone who works with clients in different parts of the world I really do long for a single time zone that we can all share. In local life will 12 noon will always be the ~same time, but for business I don't care. Usually I try to use UTC, but it's not always successful, and just trying to pin down a suitable time to speak to someone across timezones can be difficult. --- However, "replacing all writing with the international phonetic alphabet" is a terrible idea

thanksgiving 12y ago
> However, "replacing all writing with the international phonetic alphabet" is a terrible idea What if we could dissociate spoken language from written language? We could just use the 26 letters in English to write everything. This could allow Romanization of everything without those pesky accent marks. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese
- dyadic 12y ago
  Perhaps I should have expanded on why writing a spoken language as IPA is a bad idea. Language is fluid and always changing, if you start to spell words using the IPA then you need variations for every different accent and you need to update the spelling as accents change over time. Words have almost always been written down as they sound, but then the way that we say them changes. Some changes in written language happen, an obvious contemporary example being the differences between UK English and US English. But writing in IPA would mean that we need to update our written texts as our language change or it would mean that every person has to speak it the same way and in every location forever, and that you need to police it so people don't speak incorrectly.

azernik 12y ago

Once you've built a system that understands timezones and offsets from UTC, does it really add all that much complexity to support offsets that are not whole multiples of half hours or hours?

riobard 12y ago
"Once you've built a system that understands timezones and offsets from UTC" I think that's the point he's complaining about: it's damn hard to build such a system because of the artificially induced complexity.
- brudgers 12y ago
  It's the simplicity that's artificial. Noon is a local event that occurs when the sun is due south. Timezones and standardized times are the abstractions.
  - dragonwriter 12y ago
    > Noon is a local event that occurs when the sun is due south. "When the sun lies neither east nor west of a particular point on the surface of the Earth." At least, if you want "noon" to be something that happens everywhere on Earth.
    - dllthomas 12y ago
      Everywhere but two points, anyway...
  - icebraining 12y ago
    But the "natural noon" you described is more simple than the timezones with DST that might or might not happen depending on who was elected locally and nationally. A system where noon is regulated by a single, immutable equation describing the position of the Earth vis-à-vis the Sun would be much easier to implement.

wpietri 12y ago

The entire point of computers is to make things easier for people. If you want to force people to conform to make things easier for computers, you've got it exactly backwards.

jasoncartwright 12y ago

Swatch tried "Internet Time", which was also decimal. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

evanb 12y ago

Having a global timezone is not quite so easy for people's brains, either: About half of everybody will live in a place where the day changes in the middle of the... day, for the lack of a better expression. [The first day is the calendar day, the second is the solar day.]

PinguTS 12y ago

It seems you never have been abroad. Go out and explore the world yourself. The is not for fun facts. It is history and where people live. Nobody wants one time zone, because nobody wants to wake up at 8pm and go to work and such things. That is the reason why we have time zones. You know what, computers are pretty good in crunching numbers. So it is an easy task for them to do time shifts based on time zones. My iPhone is pretty good with it. I didn't had to adjust anything, when I visited Nepal and India for the last 5 years. The same is with languages. Just try to learn another human language and not a computer language. It is much more joy. The problem with these things only people have, which never experienced the world, their diversity, their history. There are so much things to discover about the world and yourself while experiencing the world.

lcedp 12y ago

1/ A single world-wide time zone won't work as I think you think it will work. At least while we care about daylight. Imagine you need to know what are business hours for someone in other region. E.g. you business hours could start at +9 single world-wide time zone, but other person's hours start at +23 SWWTZ. You are back at having timezones. 1.1/ Besides, we do have UTC. And people already use it for coordination of global events. 2/ Substituting writing system with IPA will break a lot of languages. Especially Chinese. English will branch out into dozen hardly interchangeable writing variants. With time it will get worse.