Falsehoods programmers believe about time
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Falsehoods programmers believe about time
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Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time
#2This seemed relevant, given the lunar time discussions.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time
#3Partial-hour time zone offsets (like in Nepal or St. John’s Newfoundland) were a big learning moment for me back in the day.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time
#4I actually don’t like these lists.
All abstractions are falsehoods at some level, however, if you chase rabbit holes, you will never accomplish anything. Even the macro world is a falsehood/abstraction of the underlying quantum subatomic works (I think).
What matters is if your abstraction is good enough for what you goals are. For most of the lists I have seen, you can make valuable software that people will pay you for while still believing half the “lies”.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time
#5A big reframing in my life was when I realized that timezones aren't a physical or mathematical construct: they're a legal construct.
This was driven home when Russia changed one of its timezones and we got bit by it because it turned out we had cached a build of tzdata years ago instead of building it from scratch every time we pushed out a new version (oops). The law went into effect and Russian users immediately started filing bugs.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time
#6Although the "minutes are always 60 seconds" falsehood probably won't be effected for some other reason, it's worth noting that Leap Seconds are being retired:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/18/do-not-adjust-...
The point is "a unit of time" is a human construct and we can, and do, whatever the hell we want with it.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time
#7I actually don’t like these lists. All abstractions are falsehoods at some level, however, if you chase rabbit holes, you will never accomplish anything. Even the macro world is a falsehood/abstraction of the underlying quantum subatomic works (I think). What matters is if your abstraction is good enough for what you goals are. For most of the lists I have seen, you can make valuable software that people will pay you…
But it's very important to know what things you abstract over. At least as a rough outline.
For example, if you have the abstraction of all days being 24 hours which is fine. You should know though how far you may be off with that abstraction.
If your day suddenly is more than 4% longer or shorter, you might wonder about increased or decreased traffic for that day. You should know that there are cases where your abstraction is off and what the possible results of that are, even if you're not chasing that particular rabbit hole.
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time
#8"A week (or a month) always begins and ends in the same year."
Obviously a week doesn't always begin and end in the same year, but, that a month might not is a new one for me, can someone give me an example?
(Turns out this one was sourced at the bottom, guess it has something to do with years in Roman times - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar#Beginning_o... and that a year begins on September 11th in Ethiopia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_calendar)
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time
#9"Time always goes forwards"
Re: Falsehoods programmers believe about time
#10I actually don’t like these lists. All abstractions are falsehoods at some level, however, if you chase rabbit holes, you will never accomplish anything. Even the macro world is a falsehood/abstraction of the underlying quantum subatomic works (I think). What matters is if your abstraction is good enough for what you goals are. For most of the lists I have seen, you can make valuable software that people will pay you…
But it's very important to know what things you abstract over. At least as a rough outline. For example, if you have the abstraction of all days being 24 hours which is fine. You should know though how far you may be off with that abstraction. If your day suddenly is more than 4% longer or shorter, you might wonder about increased or decreased traffic for that day. You should know that there are cases where your abst…
This is true, but again, within reason. I am 100% comfortable not knowing or understanding what design errors I have made that will cause my software to fail if used on a spaceship orbiting a black hole.