Without time zones it would be worse. Every little town would have their own time, calculated from their position
At least then everyone would be thinking about it and using UTC, not writing their programs to rely on the timezone always being the same
It’s too easy a problem to ignore/overlook right now
I agree, UTC for global is fine, might as well just do localized time as
Sun-up, 1st hour of the day, ,2nd, 3rd… Sunset for locale
Time is possibly one of the hardest things to handle properly for a coder. There’s plenty of hard problems (network loss, 3 phase commits, etc), but time stand out as really annoying.
Another one is colors. All it takes is one library to encode colors in a weird way and then mapping them between libraries is a mess.
Even worse. Daylight savings creators. I work in manufacturing and we literally stut down the production line for an hour during the “fall back” and “spring ahead” so we can manually change the time on every computer.
Does it matter if those machines are an hour out for 6 months? Why not just keep them on UTC as a rule?
For quality control it did. The real concern is people messing up time. If there was a quality complaint we wanted it to be easy for people to go back thru production data. A lot of the people operating the machinery and performing quality checks at our facility are not well educated, and the need is there to make investigating quality tasks/entering quality data very easy.
Yeah, screw Kaiser William.
My take:
Daylight savings = bad
Time zones = good
If everyone had the same clock time, we would need to know when it was morning, midday and evening for people in other locations. Scheduling stuff between locations would still suck, but it would suck differently.
Yeah but it could be improved by not using arbitrary country-decided timezones and instead simply listing “diurnal time”, basically. And then clocks could get normalized as always showing UTC nearby, too. For communication.
I don’t know about that, it seems like one of the things that makes the world simple for programmers and complex for everyone else. It doesn’t allow for large countries to split along sensible political boundaries. So if one boundary slices through the middle of New York City, too bad. Moving boundaries to instead be at state/province/etc boundaries or in the middle of nowhere like we usually see now seems more sensible.
That’s not reasonable at all. The purpose of time is to help organize society across distance. The purpose of states/countries/administrative districts is to help organize society within a similar geographical region. It is entirely reasonable for timezones to conform to political boundaries.