[Tossrock]

"The International Fixed calendar sucked the personality out of marking time, making every week and month as predictable as humanly possible. [...] It's an impossible feat that doesn't need pulling off and, thankfully, no one is trying to anymore."

Spoken like someone who's never had to write date handling logic. Having "personality" in your calendar system is a bug, not a feature. I feel confident that we could maintain our overall levels of personality/joie de vivre/je ne sais quoi by spending less time dealing with an incredibly arbitrary calendar system and more time doing things we actually enjoy.

[tjradcliffe]

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."

[saraid216]

> 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. :(

[Swizec]

My favourite example of this is "tomorrow" because obviously, tomorrow is when you and I wake up the next day, NOT a minute past midnight.

Annoys me to no end that most calendar systems still don't understand that.

[novaleaf]

... perhaps it is telling: I can't figure out if you are being sarcastic or not. :/

[deathanatos]

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…

[daurnimator]

Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not.

If I said "the servers are down for maintenance at 2am tomorrow" when would you think they will be unavailable?

[Swizec]

I wasn't being sarcastic at all.

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".

[Dylan16807]

If I said "talk to me about it tomorrow" and later we're chatting at 1am, are you going to think I meant now?

[tempestn]

A very small percentage of the population ever has to write date handling logic. For the rest, things "just work", thanks to those few.

Besides, even as a member of that small group, I like the variety of the current calendar, inefficient as it is.

[32bitkid]

One has to admit that it complicates even trivial communications about days and times. Even questions like "What's the date of friday next week?" can't be quickly answered. Or "Is Nov 12th on the weekend?" I feel these are practical things that _most_ people would _like_ to easily reason about, but can't.

It imperial units for days; or like trying to do math in a numerical system where each significant digit has a different random radix. Does it have variety? Yes... Is even remotely fun to do anything practical with? No.

[drostie]

Well, we already do math in a crazy-radix system for time, and the not-easily-divisible unitless variable of (1 year / 1 day) means that we can't do too much better -- we can reduce the problem to about one crazy radix, but no smaller; that radix will probably always depend on the value of the more-significant number in the date (the year).

But yes, we probably should quash the "variety is fun" argument early in the discussion. The problem is that it's a persistent low cost in the back of everyone's heads. Sure, when you think about it you might like it a lot, but it will then stress you out in hard-to-perceive ways during the rest of the year, with no real benefit to show for it.

The huge error that Eastman made was to keep the same month-names for the other months. This is a bad idea; if two systems are going to exist in parallel they need to be disambiguated in practice.

[toyg]

>The huge error that Eastman made was to keep the same month-names for the other months.

The problem is, you'll find, that naming things is an incredibly political act. Agreeing on a new name for anything is a terribly complicated process, and when you're talking about something every single person has a stake in... well, it would have never happened. He tried very skillfully to bypass all that, and basically succeeded.

No, his mistake was to underestimate the clout that religious tradition still had on large sectors of the ruling elites. Even now, when we pride ourself in the "scientificness" and rationality of our societies, we're still enslaved by stories written by agrarian priests at the dawn of civilization -- in many ways, it's worse now because nobody would even entertain proposals as bold as modernizing a system we've been using, almost unchanged, for two millennia, no matter how broken it might be.

[chongli]

Even questions like "What's the date of friday next week?" can't be quickly answered.

Fortunately we don't have a very pressing need to answer these sorts of questions; we have tools galore to handle them for us: smartphones, calendars, messaging apps, meetup etc. Topics like these often remind me of one of Einstein's more famous quotes:

[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.

We used to spend an enormous amount of time teaching our children mathematical tricks which have now all been made completely obsolete by the scientific calculator. Only the most rudimentary of arithmetical strategies have survived, if only for the fact that it's still a little inconvenient to reach into your pocket when scanning and counting objects with your eyes.

[rtpg]

I disagree, many times people are trying to coordinate and one person says the 8th thinking it's a friday, but it's actually thursday. So some people think they were talking about the 8th, others talk about it like it were the 9th, and there's confusion all about.

Casual calendar coordination is really easy to mess up in the current state.

[mburns]

That quote is about memorizing a relatively arbitrary number (5,280 feet to a mile) which is only relevant when you have systems that can't be easily reasoned about.

This is precisely why the metric system, or uniform length of months, are useful.

[zhte415]

> It imperial units for days

Imperial made quite a lot of sense when numbers were small and calculations done without the aid of instruments: Using bases divisible by both 3 and 4 makes mental calculation quite quick.

[xamolxix]

> Using bases divisible by both 3 and 4 makes mental calculation quite quick.

Easier than base 10?

[jccooper]

Half a foot, six inches. Third of a foot, four inches. Quarter of a foot, three inches. Sixth, eighth, and twelfth also go into whole inches.

For bigger projects, yards are fairly easy to decompose too, into whole feet and inches.

It's a good system for projects of human or slightly super-human scale using low resolution instruments and mental math. It's rotten for high precision computerized tasks of widely varying scales.

[Dylan16807]

I can't recall the last time I needed a third. Halves, quarters, tenths, hundredths...

[wtbob]

You know, given that we have computers to perform the calculations, my own mad dream is to return to solar hours: twelve hours from sunrise to sunset, and twelve from sunset to sunrise. Thus summer hours would be longer and winter days would be shorter. Ditto minutes and seconds.

Science would of course need to have a standardised second almost always different from the current second, but that's no different from having a standardised temperature and pressure almost always different from the current temperature and pressure.

[juliangregorian]

What on earth do you see the benefit of this as?

[wtbob]

My theory is that living according to the sun is more natural and consequently more pleasant than living according to a metronome.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

Someone's never written very many sql queries.

I'm pointing at you, tempestn.

[sk5t]

An excellent video touching on some of the intractable aspects of our datetime-marking system's personality quirks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

[jerf]

"I feel confident that we could maintain our overall levels of personality/joie de vivre/je ne sais quoi by spending less time dealing with an incredibly arbitrary calendar system and more time doing things we actually enjoy."

Backing your claim, I'd observe this is already a manifested fact. Consider holidays like Easter, which already are set by rules that have little to do with the calendar itself, and there's a number of such holidays floating about without any special problems of their own (above and beyond the problems of the calendar in general). The "personality" of the year is already independent of how we mark the time.

[delecti]

I've never felt any positive feelings towards any of the variances in how we keep time. "Oh golly gee, December's got a full 31 days, how exciting"