As a Real Programmer™ I have developed such a deep fear of anything time and date related that I would fully endorse dispatching an API call to the tz_database instead of attempting any fucking part of this.
Kids, it’s fine to meme about silly stuff… but date and time is deadly serious, regardless of how careful you think you’re being you are wrong.
Do you know how many timezones there are in Indiana? No? Look it up and scream in horror.
Here’s a fun thought experiment: What gregorian year and date will the spacian date value of zero correlate to? Trick question.
The atomic clock on the moon and every other celestial body colonized will simply start at zero, and thanks to relativity it will not actually be the same rate of time passing as on earth.
What if I told you that weekend days are locale dependent?!
Time and date is the black hole where optimistic programmers go to die. Nothing is simply with localisation and if you think it is, you mustn’t have worked enough with it.
Source: Run a system that schedules millions of interactions across the world and deeply depend on this. The amount of code to manage and/or call out to external services to give us information about time zones, summer time, locale specific settings, day names, calendar systems, week numbers etc etc.
IMO every datetime should be in utc, and variables for datetimes should either be suffixed “Utc” or have a type indicating their time zone (DateTimeOffset or UtcDateTime etc). Conversion to local time happens at the last possible second (e.g. in the view model or an outbound http request parameter). Of course that doesn’t solve the problem of interoperating with other morons programmers who don’t follow these rules, but it keeps things a lot neater locally.
Scheduling based on regional time conventions (holidays, weekends, etc) is just not great though.
Honestly the first one is the only one that works when people define the first day of the week differently. On the other hand, it does make you wonder. If Sunday is the first day of the week (as it is in many places) then how is it also part of the weekend?
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