[kragen]

I find it amusing that in 02023, after 77 years of software development, they referred to something like 01992 as "early software development", because people had only been developing software for 46 years at that time. But it's true that most software that has been written so far was written after that.

Are we still in "early software development"? Presumably most software that will ever be written hasn't been written yet.

[andrehacker]

Well, yes and no. For many people in our profession, anything related to computers is thought to have started in the late 70s when computers became things that worked outside of elaborate data centers. It is somewhat amusing that the collective memory now is that the mouse and GUI were invented by Xerox, virtualization is thought to be a thing from the late 90s, and touch screens are from the 2000s, even though all that technology was around since the 60s. We must have driven the old-timers nuts with all the widespread mainstream bragging about our “inventions”.

[kragen]

Yeah, I always struggle with how to describe what Xerox invented GUIwise. Sutherland's SKETCHPAD in 01963 had an interactive CAD graphical user interface with windows, icons, and a pointer—but no menus, overlapping windows, or desktop, and not much text (it slowed the display list redraw down a lot). NLS had white backgrounds, hypertext, and a mouse, but still no command menus or WYSIWYG editing or overlapping windows. You issued textual commands to make edits to the displayed text. What I'm using now to write this is recognizably "the same thing" as Smalltalk-76 in a way that Smalltalk-76 wasn't the same thing as Smalltalk-72 or NLS or Sketchpad.

So, "the desktop GUI"? But Smalltalk-80 didn't have a desktop in the sense of a place to represent your files with icons, even if Star did. WYSIWYG? Direct manipulation? But Shneiderman's #1 example of "direct manipulation" is Emacs.

But it's also recognizably "the same" as medieval manuscripts in many ways!

[jagged-chisel]

Your octal years aren’t coming out right

[Borg3]

Yeah.. and its annoying to read.. I always laught at people who try to make IDs with leading zeros. and then one day BOOM!! overflow.

Its especially common in namings like: THING-01 THING-02.. we will never have more than 100 of them.. and then BOOM.

I always say: leave it at fucking 1 and count up. Thats why we invented Natural Sorting to sort this out...

[hunter2_]

The thing is... it's generally safe to truncate a leading zero [0], but it's not necessarily safe to truncate a trailing zero. For example, sometimes trailing zeros convey precision, and then you've got SEMVER [1] causing situations like Drupal 7.1 and 7.10 and 7.100 (spanning 100 minor releases).

[0] ZIP codes and phone numbers are important exceptions, but it's a non-issue if you always process these as strings, never as numbers, which is a reasonable constraint because we don't need to sort these numerically. Lexicographical sort is perfectly fine.

[1] The concept mentioned in footnote 0 does not really apply to SEMVER, because we do like to sort versions numerically. Lexicographical sort is wrong. But it's a group of dot-delimited integers, not to be conflated with floats, so while 7.100 comes before 7.2 when sorting floats, 7.100 comes after 7.2 when sorting SEMVER because the 2 and 100 are just integers.

[xnorswap]

Counterpoint: Natural sorting likely will be orders of magnitude slower sorting than ordinal sorting.

For most situations, the better solution is storing the index separately to the name in another column or in metadata.

But for some stores, there isn't an easy way to do to store or sort on metadata, and so prefixing leading zeroes helps keep things stored more naturally while using the more efficient sort.

[Borg3]

Oh of course it is. But if you have serveral 100s up to several 1000s items, you do not care. Computers are here to do the heavy lifting. If we talk about millions of items, its completly different story. Probably simple numerical ID is out of option and you start to shard them somehow. Use right tool for right task!

[spogbiper]

ah.. so use THING-001. got it

[unwind]

See https://longnow.org/ideas/long-now-years-five-digit-dates-an....

[jagged-chisel]

So a little silly, a little serious.

On a practical note, we don’t tend to prefix zeroes to numbers because they are superfluous. If programmers are using strings to store a year and those strings are limited to four digits, your project likely has a host of other issues that will become problems long before Y10K.

We already have a precedent, in programming, for prefixed zeroes having meaning: “an octal number follows.” Much like 0x indicates a hexadecimal number.

[xnorswap]

I hope this is satire?

Just in case it's serious or semi-serious:

It's utterly ridiculous to worry about 10k date problems given we first have these:

2038 problem ( Signed unix time overflow )

2069 problem ( strptime() parsing )

2079 problem ( unsigned days since 1 January 1900 )

2100 problem ( FAT/DOS )

2106 problem ( Unsigned unix time overflow )

Further out but still way before 10k:

2262 ( signed nanoseconds since 1 January 1970 )

And that's just the bigger ones. ( See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_formatting_and_storage_bu... )

What's the point of prefixing 0 to dates written forum posts? It just confuses contemporary human readers.

Historians do a reasonable job at adequately translating dates from thousands of years ago across multiple calendar changes and societal collapses. Whatever future historian 10k+ years in the future is reading your post, should it survive, will be able to work out the date in the post, just from the language and other context clues alone.

It'll be hard to confuse 12025 with 2025 in the same way it's hard to confuse 2025 with AD 25.

[numpad0]

a leading zero "implies" octal at least since K&R C, which predates that page by 000000043 years. You guys need a different prefix for that.

[RKFADU_UOFCCLEL]

It's when the idea of selling software became accessible (in terms of education / affordability) to most people.

[kragen]

That hasn't happened yet, but it's close.