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Comment by jasode

The 2 different types of datetimes encode different information and is not purely a display/presentation issue, it's also storage issue.

I happen to call them "scientific datetime" vs "cultural/political datetime". However, the software dev industry has not converged on a standard vocabulary to delineate the 2 types which is unfortunate because that means programmers are unaware that the difference exists. Concepts are more top-of-mind when there are good names to label them.

If a programmer doesn't understand how the 2 datetimes behave differently, they will create software bugs as I've outlined before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39418897

There's the meme of "store UTC everywhere" (maybe perceived as correct because of superficial similarity to "use UTF-8 everywhere") ... but storing datetimes as UTC is only unambiguous for historical events such as timestamps of activity stored in server logs.

But future datetimes can have ambiguous edge cases which causes the split into 2 different types.

parent jasode 1 month ago

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