Blame it on Ceasar: A rant on calendaring

by Lennart Regebro

Talk Description

Timekeeping on all levels is surprisingly difficult. This talk explains why it’s sort hard, and which parts Python can help you with.

  • What is calendaring, really, and why is it so complex?
  • What’s in a year?
  • Dissecting the Julian/Gregorian calendar
  • Mesopotamian mathematics
  • Time zones
  • Recurring events is less fun than you think.

Introduction

The problem with calendaring is that it is based off of multiple cycles that don’t work well with each other

Rome: They had a 10 month calendar that made winter a dead period in the calendar. Eventually they added January and February

Lunar Calendars

  • The year is twelve lunar months long.
  • The year is out of sync with the seasons
  • Example: The Islamic Calendar

Lunisolar calendars

  • The year is 12 or 13 months long

  • The year is kept in sync with season by leap months

  • examples

    • Hebrew
    • Buddhist

Solar Calendars

The villain of the story is Caesar

  • The year follows the solstices/seasons

  • The moon is ignored completely

  • Examples:

    • French republican
    • Julian Calendar

Thanks to the success of the Roman Empire Europe takes a weird Solar calendar, and thanks to the success of Europe, the world takes it on too.

How do you implement the calendar yourself?

You don’t. You use libraries.

  • Python has datetime, date, and calendar

  • JavaScript is momentjs.com, which is the current best option for JavaScript

  • Java has issues thanks to an early design decision mistake.

  • The US calendar shows Sunday as the first day of the week, which is confusing because it puts the first day on the weekend.

Timezone woes

  • There are not 24 timezones, there are standard times per country
  • standard times change
  • If you want to accurate describe times from the past, you need a database of timezone changes.

Abbreviation Evil

  • CST

    • Australia CST
    • China Standard Time
    • Chungua Standard Time
    • US CST

Timezones are based on politics, not science.

Daylight Savings Time

  • Changing the hour can cause problems with computers. Going over midnight twice breaks things.
  • JavaScript handles this well
  • Python handles it well

Pytz discussion

He gave examples of how this module does a lot of the lifting for you on timezones and daylight saving time:

pytz 30 - 15 dateutil

Advantage pytz

  • Works well
  • Except for POSIX

Current standard specification

  • TODO: Find out specified RFCs

Datepickers