[HN Gopher] Common Calendrical Fallacies
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Common Calendrical Fallacies
Author : _ttg
Score : 26 points
Date : 2022-02-08 11:49 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (yourcalendricalfallacyis.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (yourcalendricalfallacyis.com)
| dahfizz wrote:
| This comes off as very "well akchtually"; more snarky than
| helpful.
|
| A great example:
|
| >It is normal that the Sept-, Oct-, Nov-, and Dec- months are
| numbered 9, 10, 11, and 12
|
| >False. This is very weird. They used to be months 7, 8, 9, and
| 10, but some reform to the Roman calendar back in the day
| resulted in the creation of January and February, which messed
| everything up.
|
| No software project cares what the calendar looked like during
| the roman empire. Sure, its quirky that OCTober is month 10
| instead of 8. Doesn't affect anything at all.
|
| > The current year is 2020
|
| > False. It's the year 5780 in the Hebrew calendar.
|
| Obviously, anyone who says "the current year is 2020" is talking
| about the Gregorian calendar that everyone is familiar with. If
| your wife asked to have dinner at 7pm, are you going to scold her
| for not specifying the implied UTC offset? Its silly to even
| bring up.
|
| That said, I will never willingly write code that deals with
| times / calendars.
| allemagne wrote:
| It might be a context-specific thing, but I didn't really find
| the tone snarky or off-putting. Those pedantic historical edge-
| cases are pretty interesting even though I will probably never
| have to worry about them.
| noneeeed wrote:
| You say "No software project cares"... but I'm sure there are
| pieces of software out there used for dealing with
| historical/archeological data and have to deal with stuff like
| this :) I would not want to have to work on it.
|
| Archeologists must spend a lot of time reconciling different
| calendars and all the changes that have happened over the
| years.
|
| And yeah, if I go the rest of my career never having to work
| with calendars or scheduling I'll be a happy man.
| nulbyte wrote:
| > This comes off as very "well akchtually"; more snarky than
| helpful.
|
| I don't think so, but even if it does, I know some folks that
| could read this. Plenty of folks I work with build reports that
| modify times in ways that are incomprehensible. Even the
| Olympics can't get their online schedule right: Change to "my
| time," and the times may be right, but most of the days are
| still wrong for me.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >This is very weird. They used to be months 7, 8, 9, and 10,
| but some reform to the Roman calendar back in the day resulted
| in the creation of January and February, which messed
| everything up.
|
| I agree in that I don't like the snark but this one fact bugs
| me more than people can possibly empathize with. Once I
| realized October _should_ be the eighth month, switch was
| permanently flipped in my brain and now I type 8 for October
| and it trips me up constantly.
|
| Look, I get that calendar reform isn't easy. But the old months
| were all clearly named after numerical sequences. Why would the
| Romans intentionally break the numbering?!?!
| contravariant wrote:
| It would sound decidedly less snarky if they didn't start all
| sentences with "False.", but listing pathological examples is
| not by itself snarky.
| noneeeed wrote:
| I like this.
|
| I've seen a number of "Falshoods programmers believe about X" and
| they almost never provide examples or explanations, which is
| rather frustrating for some of the more obscure or weird cases.
| TehShrike wrote:
| I wish there was a version of this that only contained examples
| relevant to e.g. the Gregorian calendar, or even within the
| subset of the Gregorian calendar specified within POSIX.
|
| I get whiplash going back and forth between "relevant thing I
| need to care about" and "obviously irrelevant" in this list
| atoav wrote:
| Some of these are quite interesting, e.g. that Oceania has an
| offset from ITC >12 hours. Others are coming of more like
| pedantic "gotcha" questions where the answer is that some more or
| less obscure calendar system is the exception here. Yeah sure it
| is, why wouldn't the year in the japanese calendar depend on the
| death of their emperor. That just isn't something my small
| software tool is likely willing to support anyways.
|
| So I think instead of "scolding" the reader with a _False_ here,
| maybe a _Depends_ would be both more friendly and more well
| suited.
| nulbyte wrote:
| > So I think instead of "scolding" the reader with a False
| here, maybe a Depends would be both more friendly and more well
| suited.
|
| I like this. False suggests it is objectively false, but you're
| right, it really depends on more information. And it's
| important that people working with dates and times understand
| that they need more information.
| allemagne wrote:
| Pretty cool reminder that calendars and time in general are one
| of those troublesome domains of fractal complexity. Even this
| seems to just scratch the surface of regional variations of
| certain traditional calendars, how people's ages can be
| determined differently, etc.
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