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> 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 read articles like this and come to the conclusion that UTC is flawed, not Unix time. Leap seconds seem mostly useless. People seem to think they are important for astronomy, but for every astronomical calculation I have ever done, your first step is converting from UTC to TAI. Move any jumps in time to once a century (or millennium). Such jumps have occurred in the past (Julian to Gregorian) and are easy to handle…
On a long enough horizon, I take it as a foregone conclusion that simple metric measurements will become standard.
Unix Time actually never goes backward: it just stagnates during a leap second. The article uses fictional fractional second to argue the contrary but I don't think it makes much sense. Unix Time is represented an integer and has no concept of such a fractional unit.
That's an important distinction because it means that if you use Unix Time as a timestamp you can actually be sure than an event with a smaller stamp happened before. You can't say anything about the ordering of events having the same timestamp but that remains true with or without leap second.
I read articles like this and come to the conclusion that UTC is flawed, not Unix time. Leap seconds seem mostly useless. People seem to think they are important for astronomy, but for every astronomical calculation I have ever done, your first step is converting from UTC to TAI. Move any jumps in time to once a century (or millennium). Such jumps have occurred in the past (Julian to Gregorian) and are easy to handle…
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I read articles like this and come to the conclusion that UTC is flawed, not Unix time. Leap seconds seem mostly useless. People seem to think they are important for astronomy, but for every astronomical calculation I have ever done, your first step is converting from UTC to TAI. Move any jumps in time to once a century (or millennium). Such jumps have occurred in the past (Julian to Gregorian) and are easy to handle…
The different time definitions exist to support different use cases. UTC isn't flawed, in fact the adjustments that keep it aligned to solar time are very helpful for its defined use cases.
It's just that time is complicated. If you think you will be doing time math where duration is paramount consider using TAI.
PS: for all those who think 'time' is complicated in fascinating ways, you should fall down the geodesy hole some time. Saying 'where' on earth something is located is .. not simple.
There's a more insidious problem here - that a computer's internal representation of a second actually falls in line with an actual second. Quartz clocks are, at best, approximations. Temperature adjusted approximations at that.
Without NTP and its ilk, computers would be a complete disaster when it comes to keeping regular time.