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1. Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp)'s status on Monday, 09-May-2022 23:59:53 UTC Darius Kazemi

   I had to think about a time zone parsing problem for 5 minutes at work and my body was immediately overwhelmed by the need to sleep for an hour.

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   • Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp)'s status on Tuesday, 10-May-2022 00:00:22 UTC Darius Kazemi

     in reply to

     • Kit Rhett Aultman

     @roadriverrail I like to point out the 15, 30, and 45 minute offset time zones. Also the fact that any of these rules can change whenever some government body somewhere in the world decides to change them for some reason.

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   • Kit Rhett Aultman (roadriverrail@signs.codes)'s status on Tuesday, 10-May-2022 00:00:23 UTC Kit Rhett Aultman

     in reply to

     @darius I once had to work on a time zone problem. I remember explaining to the boss that time zones are just madness because they define more than a simple GMT offset; they also set your DST dates. And that matters in Arizona, where you're on Mountain time but don't observe DST, except for the Navajo nation, which does. He asked why that was so important, and I noted that tribal lands are over 1/4 the land mass of Arizona. Then he knew my pain.

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   • clarity flowers (clarity@xoxo.zone)'s status on Friday, 13-May-2022 11:34:00 UTC clarity flowers

     in reply to

     • Ryuno-Ki

     @darius @RyunoKi using NodaTime (the library used as a reference in this post) completely changed my perspective on working with datetimes and also now makes me very angry about every language's datetime stdlib which all seemed designed to maximize footguns.

     The end result is programmers learn "datetimes are scary" instead of "this stdlib sucks"

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   • Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp)'s status on Friday, 13-May-2022 11:34:01 UTC Darius Kazemi

     in reply to

     • Ryuno-Ki

     @RyunoKi I'm scared to read this https://codeblog.jonskeet.uk/2019/03/27/storing-utc-is-not-a-silver-bullet/

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   • Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp)'s status on Friday, 13-May-2022 11:34:02 UTC Darius Kazemi

     in reply to

     So I guess the most correct thing to say is that there is no test coverage for historical time in Ruby (this matters because time zones change over time so if you are trying to make accurate comparison across years and especially decades this will come into play)

   • Ryuno-Ki (ryunoki@layer8.space)'s status on Friday, 13-May-2022 11:34:02 UTC Ryuno-Ki

     in reply to

     @darius
     An … entertaining subject to say the least:

     https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood#dates-and-time

   • Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp)'s status on Friday, 13-May-2022 11:34:03 UTC Darius Kazemi

     in reply to

     Wait I stand corrected! There are some tests, they are in Time and not DateTime. But also the ruby docs point out that there are actual differences between the two if you are calculating historical time

     https://github.com/ruby/ruby/blob/d92f09a5eea009fa28cd046e9d0eb698e3d94c5c/spec/ruby/library/time/shared/rfc2822.rb

   • Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp)'s status on Friday, 13-May-2022 11:34:04 UTC Darius Kazemi

     in reply to

     Normally I'm not a stickler for 100% test coverage but...... this is a stdlib in Ruby? The programming language?

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   • Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp)'s status on Friday, 13-May-2022 11:34:04 UTC Darius Kazemi

     in reply to

     Oh well, another day, another data point in favor of "the fact that computers run at all is a miracle"

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   • Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp)'s status on Friday, 13-May-2022 11:34:05 UTC Darius Kazemi

     in reply to

     There are handful that are for timezone offsets, but for example, DateTime.parse is not tested for things like "PDT" or "GMT" in a string

   • Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp)'s status on Friday, 13-May-2022 11:34:06 UTC Darius Kazemi

     in reply to

     There also appear to be.... no unit tests for timezones in Rubylang??? Am I reading this right? They haven't even been touched in ~3 years and most of them are placeholder

     https://github.com/ruby/ruby/tree/master/spec/ruby/library/datetime

   • Darius Kazemi (darius@friend.camp)'s status on Friday, 13-May-2022 11:34:07 UTC Darius Kazemi

     in reply to

     From the official Ruby DateTime docs:

     > If you also have to deal with timezones then best of luck - just bear in mind that you'll probably be dealing with local solar times, since it wasn't until the 19th century that the introduction of the railways necessitated the need for Standard Time and eventually timezones.

     Friends don't let friends use time zones

   • mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 13-May-2022 11:35:39 UTC mhoye

     in reply to

     • Aram Zucker-Scharff

     @Chronotope @darius Told a class once, there are some classes of software problem where you only have two choices; you dedicate your life to them, or you exclusively use tools made by people who have dedicated their lives to to them. Every other option is a road to madness and agony.

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   • Aram Zucker-Scharff (chronotope@indieweb.social)'s status on Friday, 13-May-2022 11:35:46 UTC Aram Zucker-Scharff

     in reply to

     @darius It truly is the worst.

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   • mhoye (mhoye@mastodon.social)'s status on Friday, 13-May-2022 11:37:03 UTC mhoye

     in reply to

     • Aram Zucker-Scharff

     @Chronotope @darius If you choose to pursue that path - timezones and cryptography for example - you will have a long, rewarding career ahead of you, and outside of a small cadre of your fellow developers, nobody will ever know who you are, or how much the world owes you.

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