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Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python

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Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python

#11

Post by dsr_ »

ecma wrote: post #8
0x0 wrote: post #4

Inserting a day between the regular weekdays once a year sounds pretty dangerous to me. I bet there are a lot of things that need to happen weekly that would quickly go out of whack if they are delayed a day.

I think we would need to be more precise about our measures of lifetime for some things (recent e.g. would be MH370's black box battery life rating) but the idea of measure lifetime with days since an event is already used quite widely (I rarely heard the phrase 2 weeks since that event) and could be adjusted to without much difficulty. Financial and similar institutions would likely treat the festival day(s) as they…

Once we get off the surface of the earth, seconds are more useful than days. Or, more likely, Ksecs and Msecs. A kilo-second is 16.67 minutes, 100 Ksecs is 27.7 hours, an Msec is 11.57 days. 30 Msecs is 95% of an Earth year. These are all useful measures for humans to work in.

Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python

#12

Post by toyg »

It's sad to see that, in what we all consider to be an "enlightened" age for science and rationality, the calendar problem is considered a de-facto taboo, something that will never be changed. It's such an obvious legacy hack, it should be refactored with a modern and proper design, but the API is so popular that breaking it would generate unbearable amounts of stop-energy. I wish we could have a wrapper or something.

Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python

#13

Post by maxerickson »

toyg wrote: post #12

It's sad to see that, in what we all consider to be an "enlightened" age for science and rationality, the calendar problem is considered a de-facto taboo, something that will never be changed. It's such an obvious legacy hack, it should be refactored with a modern and proper design, but the API is so popular that breaking it would generate unbearable amounts of stop-energy. I wish we could have a wrapper or something…

Years and days are both reasonable periods to track and while some other system of tracking which day we are on is easy to imagine, the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with (it's 2 numbers...).

Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python

#15

Post by munificent »

maxerickson wrote: post #13
toyg wrote: post #12

It's sad to see that, in what we all consider to be an "enlightened" age for science and rationality, the calendar problem is considered a de-facto taboo, something that will never be changed. It's such an obvious legacy hack, it should be refactored with a modern and proper design, but the API is so popular that breaking it would generate unbearable amounts of stop-energy. I wish we could have a wrapper or something…

Years and days are both reasonable periods to track and while some other system of tracking which day we are on is easy to imagine, the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with (it's 2 numbers...).

> the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with

OK, then tell me what day of the week May 4th, 2054 will be.

Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python

#16

Post by jkdearden »

toyg wrote: post #12

It's sad to see that, in what we all consider to be an "enlightened" age for science and rationality, the calendar problem is considered a de-facto taboo, something that will never be changed. It's such an obvious legacy hack, it should be refactored with a modern and proper design, but the API is so popular that breaking it would generate unbearable amounts of stop-energy. I wish we could have a wrapper or something…

It's analogous to the current situation with the metric and imperial unit systems - yes, it would make sense to switch away from imperial units, but it would require many people to fundamentally change how they think about distance, volume, speed, etc. (or time, in the case of the calendar).

Although in that case, we sort of have a wrapper, in that many labels list both types of units, but I tend to just look at the unit that I know, and haven't built up a correspondence between the two, so that doesn't really help adoption.

Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python

#17

Post by jack-r-abbit »

We need to be able to timestamp stuff still, right?

If the 28th of Bichat is 2014-13-28 and the 1st of Moses is 2015-01-01, how do we timestamp those "uncharted" festival days? Would they just be 2014-13-29 (and 2014-13-30 on leap year) but just not have a day of week name?

Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python

#18

Post by jack-r-abbit »

munificent wrote: post #15
maxerickson wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Years and days are both reasonable periods to track and while some other system of tracking which day we are on is easy to imagine, the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with (it's 2 numbers...).

> the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with OK, then tell me what day of the week May 4th, 2054 will be.

Monday

Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python

#19

Post by crux »

jack-r-abbit wrote: post #17

We need to be able to timestamp stuff still, right? If the 28th of Bichat is 2014-13-28 and the 1st of Moses is 2015-01-01 , how do we timestamp those "uncharted" festival days? Would they just be 2014-13-29 (and 2014-13-30 on leap year) but just not have a day of week name?

Good question. In the library, intercalary days are just their own month. So it would just be 2015-14-1.

Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python

#20

Post by [deleted] »

joeclark77 wrote: post #2

> Finally it is perennial, in that the weekdays of every year are always the same. No, the epagomenal/intercalary days would change this from year to year. The weekdays would be the same from month to month within a given year, of course (assuming the extra day doesn't fall somewhere in the middle).

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