Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
alexwlchan.net
Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
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Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
#2Love it. You will continue to capture my heart and my upvotes whenever you post anything about the many nuances of storing and representing time. Or something about Unicode / character sets.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
#3tl;dr: you should know about leap seconds.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
#4> But it’s unsatisfying to say “this is false” without explaining why
Got my upvote. I can't stand the "falsehoods programmers believe" articles that make a point out of not backing up any of their claims.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
#5> But it’s unsatisfying to say “this is false” without explaining why Got my upvote. I can't stand the "falsehoods programmers believe" articles that make a point out of not backing up any of their claims.
Is this really a problem? The "falsehood programmers believe" articles I remember reading all list things that were either obvious, or obvious in retrospect.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
#6I found this out some years ago and for some reason I felt a profound sense of betrayal. :D
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
#7> But it’s unsatisfying to say “this is false” without explaining why Got my upvote. I can't stand the "falsehoods programmers believe" articles that make a point out of not backing up any of their claims.
I blame (perhaps unfairly) this idea that people write a lot of programming related articles and blogs as resume fodder, and not really for an audience beyond that.
I've run across so many "how to do" and it's the same example code and you can see where it has skewed over time... and evolved into something that the author really doesn't understand.
Same goes with some of the fundamentals and gee wiz "falsehoods" and such articles.
I appreciate the folks taking the time to write it but if they're not going to tell me why:
1.) I don't know if they even know / gave me the right idea.
2.) If I can't grok why then I'm not going to really understand it...
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
#8> But it’s unsatisfying to say “this is false” without explaining why Got my upvote. I can't stand the "falsehoods programmers believe" articles that make a point out of not backing up any of their claims.
Yeah, the standard falsehoods listicle would have ended right before that line.
Timekeeping is strange. Makes me want to store everything in TAI and then convert it for display.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
#9One thing to note is that both Google and Amazon smear out the leap seconds https://developers.google.com/time/smear so that this is no longer a falsehood on AWS or GCP. I suspect, over time, more organizations will adopt this approach.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about Unix time
#10Is it also possible for Unix time to go backwards with NTP? I assume that's much more common in practice than leap seconds?