Yeah, it sucks the personality out of marking time like metric sucks the personality out of measuring space. I like personality in my dog and my friends, not in my systems of measurement.
Dates are almost impossible to reason about, and yet people are so used to our current broken system they aren't even aware of how badly they manage it. It is routine for date-time packages to produce bizarre results like "a month before a month from now" not being "today" in all cases because no one has any idea what anyone else means by "month", although everyone who has never thought about these problems is certain that everyone else means exactly what they mean in all ambiguous cases.
Anyone who has worked on date-time problems (not even libraries, just trying to correct for the special cases, cultural differences or just plain weirdness that the library of your choice doesn't deal with) will recognize the horrible truth of the joke, "I used to be in favour of space-travel, then I realized what effect it will have on date-time libraries."
> Anyone who has worked on date-time problems (not even libraries, just trying to correct for the special cases, cultural differences or just plain weirdness that the library of your choice doesn't deal with) will recognize the horrible truth of the joke, "I used to be in favour of space-travel, then I realized what effect it will have on date-time libraries."
...I think you just killed a piece of my soul... I understood that perfectly. :(
In my head I keep a concept of "physical day" (real calendar days, followed by other, real calendar days) and "logical day", which is the day as I am currently experiencing or referring to it. If, after a long Monday, you're up past midnight (i.e, it is now Tuesday), then the "phyiscal" day is "Tuesday" and the logical day is "Monday". The logical day progresses either when you go to sleep (at which point one ends, and another begins when you wake), or at dawn.¹
Person to person speech is almost always in logical days; "tomorrow" would not be a minute past midnight in this system. This at least makes some things make sense.
¹There _still_ tons of issues with this, such as people who work at night and sleep during the day, people can be on different logical days, some places don't have a dawn for several months…
If you said "2am tomorrow" I would assume two hours after next midnight. Perhaps this is a result of my usually late schedule because I normally go to bed around 2am, so everything up to then and including midnight is "tonight".
Dates are almost impossible to reason about, and yet people are so used to our current broken system they aren't even aware of how badly they manage it. It is routine for date-time packages to produce bizarre results like "a month before a month from now" not being "today" in all cases because no one has any idea what anyone else means by "month", although everyone who has never thought about these problems is certain that everyone else means exactly what they mean in all ambiguous cases.
Anyone who has worked on date-time problems (not even libraries, just trying to correct for the special cases, cultural differences or just plain weirdness that the library of your choice doesn't deal with) will recognize the horrible truth of the joke, "I used to be in favour of space-travel, then I realized what effect it will have on date-time libraries."