Why use fixed length decimals at all? Why not just store the date with sufficient bits and render it with as many decimals as required? 9998, 9999, 10000. Not an issue.
There are problems we absolutely should be thinking ahead 8000 years to solve for (or help mitigate)– climate change, species protections, sustainability, etc.
Call me skeptical, but reformatting dates for a "bug" in 8000 years seems extraordinarily silly. To think humanity will likely be using the same time measurement systems, computers that operate remotely similarly to ours today, same written/spoken languages, etc is laughable.
8000 years ago, the entire world's human population was roughly equal to that of London today and still just figuring out agriculture.
Even in passing comments in the 'year of the clock' 02025 to some forum? So the idea is that the computing systems in the YotC 12025 parsing hackernews from a 10000 years prior would experience a "bug" when encountring 4 digit dates?
You know, back in 01999 we were sticking representation of dates into these bit sized 'registers'. Certainly hope by the time we hit 10000 CE "long term thinking" has made significant inroards in the field of information processing ..
The real bug being addressed is not a technical bug but a societal and cultural bug. Writing the 0 in front is a reminder that the present moment is just the beginning and that behavior that benefits us in the short term may cause problems in the long term.
https://longnow.org/about/