• FooBarrington@lemmy.world
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    3 hours ago

    My brother in Christ, there’s more to time than just storing it. Every datetime library I’ve ever used only documents formatting/parsing support up to four year digits. If they suddenly also supported five digits, I guarantee it will lead to bugs in handling existing dates, as not all date formats could still be parsed unambiguously.

    It won’t help you if time is stored perfectly, while none of your applications support it.

    Regarding Y2K, it wasn’t horse shit - thousands upon thousands of developer hours were invested to prevent these issues before they occurred. Had they not done so, a bunch of systems would have broken, because parsing time isn’t just about displaying 19 or 20.

    • friendlymessage@feddit.org
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      49 minutes ago

      I would hope that these kinds of parsers are not used in critical applications that could actually lead to catastrophic events, that’s definitely different to Y2K. There would be bugs, yes, but quite fixable ones.

      Regarding Y2K, it wasn’t horse shit - thousands upon thousands of developer hours were invested to prevent these issues before they occurred. Had they not done so, a bunch of systems would have broken, because parsing time isn’t just about displaying 19 or 20.

      “There’s no glory in prevention”. I guess it’s hard to grasp nowadays, that mankind at some point actually tried to stop catastrophies from happening and succeeded