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by tankenmate 3484 days ago
In effect leap time has been used since the middle on the first millennium BC, the Babylonians discovered the difference between mean solar time and sidereal time and had corrected clocks ever since then. In order to reconcile relative earth surface time with earth mean solar time meant that time had to be inserted or removed somewhere.

In the spirit of DevOps small frequent changes are better than big infrequent changes we have leap seconds instead of leap minutes, hours, days etc. In this way noon is still when the sun is at it's highest (+/- 0.5 relative earth surface seconds).

1 comments

Leap minutes could be publicized a century before being implemented, making sure all libraries accounted for the, just like leap hours.
Which then means, if you have a library that can support leap hours, why not leap seconds? More frequent small changes is much better than infrequent large changes; at the very least it will disabuse programmers of poor understanding of time and how to track it properly.