Be Excellent To Each Other

It can be.

Although the area tends to be a minefield.

Yup. Unix Epoch Time. It's generally a fucking great big integer. Right now the time is 1455805940

http://www.epochconverter.com/

You're a fucking great big integer

For some reason I feel it should be this number cubed

Not any more.

Also, that's seconds. You can also do it in milli or even microseconds.


Computers, of course, can calculate dates back further than that. And there's all sorts of oddities you have to care about, like September 1752:



There are programmers who hate date/time calculations, and there are programmers who don't hate date/time calculations... yet.

Another fun very-not-hypothetical example to think about. Why did this code, supposed to create a dummy date of birth for a three year old, make me angry in 2012? (Coders will see this right away.)

One day I'll set up a historical marker somewhere saying 'on this spot on 10 September 1752 absolutely nothing happened'.

I don't see it
At first I thought it was a leap year thing, but AddYears takes that into account. Then I thought it was because you hadn't split the declaration and the assignment (but I have no idea if that matters).
Then I wondered if it was because you meant -3 instead of 3 to go back in time and just made a mistake.
Then I remained confused.

is it because the function addYears sounds like it should add a number of years to another number of years, rather than assign a number of years to a date variable?

Yeah, that would give you a date three years in the future rather than three years in the past - although I am not sure why the code would make DocG angry. Unless that code does actually produce a date three years in the past, in which case whoever created that Date class needs shooting

Alright alright, my pseudocode was bad and I should feel bad. I tried to simplify and went too far, partly because I'm still annoyed about this bug. It was actually something like

OK, Well I don't know what getYears does, but I imagine it counts from 1900 or 1970, so her date of birth was the year 45 or something.

Jesus Christ, I meant getYears()-3. I am so bad at this.

Anyway look, the point was, it tried to build a date in the past by taking today's date and subtracting 3 from the year. So 2012-01-01 became 2009-01-01. Which is fine. But 2012-02-29 became 2009-02-29 which is very much not fine because it doesn't bloody exist.

That took one of our booking systems offline for most of the day. It made me sad.

Dates are shitty.

I have literally tested a new web page today which looks all golden and passes all my tests.

Deploy to server.

Forget* that server is in American format and today's date is now 2/18/2016.


*Like, literally every time forget. I should write it down sometime.

Change the date format on the server. What could possibly go wrong?

Without question, you should change it on your dev box.

Dates are hateful, but not as hateful as character sets.

It's an Azure hosted cloud service. I don't think I can change it. But if I can, I can't be arsed reading the documentation on how to get to the bit I need.

I have had to become something of an expert.

Everytime I have to go near either, it makes me a sad turkey.

You did bad and you should feel bad! This is why date subtract functions exist, so people don't try and use integer subtraction

Just use the Windows 10 calculator

Only certain people have the right version of the calculator, though.

[edit]DAMNIT MYP

Or, taking the whole thing full circle, convert to epoch time, subtract three years' worth of seconds, then convert back

Edit - DAMMIT MYP

That's not an edit, idiot

No, you're an idiot, now we must fight

That wouldn't work, doofus.

Yes it would. Of course, three years' worth of seconds in this instance is three years worth of seconds for a three year period that spans a leap year, but that was deliberately assumed.

But you'd have to calculate the amount of seconds in the previous three years, so it's fairly pointless.

Entirely pointless - it was a joke.

/kills everyone

Do it in months. The number of months over a three-year period always stays the same.

You bellend. The number of years over a three year period always stays the same, too.

I didn't write that code! I use JodaTime like a winner.

Dammit. I was hoping that would be the one and only time I could look down on you scornfully for code quality.

He used an unbraced `if` statement the other day.

Did he become a man, my son?

I was always a GOTO man myself; sod nice, nested, structured procedure-based code; spaghetti was how we did it in the 80s.
Strangely enough, I changed career.

I heard you were the GOTO guy when it came to BASIC.

I should have bloody known.

I actually like unbraced ifs (but then Python is my second language), but they are verboten by our (extremely strict) linter.

Hah! I just *knew* you'd bite.

(To be fair I was the absolute opposite; awfully anal,purist and stuffy about it all. Despite the devices I was programming then largely using BASIC (or in the case of the Psion Organiser, OPL - a sort of quasi PASCAL/BASIC hybrid if memory serves, though it's been an awfully long time), I'd have rather died than use so much as a single unstructured procedure call/direction, line numbers or any of that shit. If the core code took more than a single screen (with upteen horizontal procedures, themselves often nested 3, 4, 5 deep), it was wrong)

Ah, them's were the days - 64KB was considered an absolute luxury, and writing to EEPROMs was the way forward.

That's a fair description. I've written some OPL in the distant past, although not much.


The project I'm working on now has required us to write a service broker server to sit between our team's product and another team's product; as of right now the shim layer is 5,255 functional lines of code (ie. every line that isn't blank), plus 4,287 lines of tests. The source directories alone are 449 Kb and 229 Kb!

That's just amazing Doc, boggles the mind. Fair play to you.

Very soon (if not already) the average size of a single web page will be bigger than the install image for Doom.

Beex, perhaps not so surprisingly, is incredibly small in the grand scheme of things - < 200KB for most pages.

Why does this happen? Are coders just less efficient?

No*, websites do more stuff, and no-one cares about dial-up users any more.

* Although you could argue it's a factor. I'm looking at you, Bootstrap.

Modern coders are also efficient along different axes to the ones we used to care about. Games programmers of all eras are like mainframe programmers in the '60s: they have to optimise for speed, so at least some parts of the code base are to-the-metal. That results in clunky, awful, unmaintainable code. The rest of us put more effort into writing code that's robust against errors and maintainable in the long term, which includes "I can add all the features in v2 without it collapsing into a complete mess." This code is less efficient in speed and space, but CPUs and SSDs are usually cheap compared to engineer-hours (unless you operate at unusual scale.)

And you can totally feel it, in my experience. Somewhere between 30-50% of the time I open a link in a new tab my entire browser freezes up for anything up to five seconds while (what I'm guessing is) shittons of fucking JavaScript in the new tab loads up. To give a couple of recent examples, Imgur does it pretty often and something like Google Play is fucking terrible for it. This is on Firefox at home and in the office so presumably it's not down to my specific setup as we're talking two difference versions of Windows and of Firefox itself. My suspicion is that people don't think they need to be efficient with code any more and just pile pages up with fucktons of terribly written crap coming from loads of difference sources all over the place.

Ah. Thank you. I can appreciate now why it took GazChap 6 years to get a functioning calendar here.