Watch out for the Calendar Geeks

blog.plover.com

24 points·sheffield··7 comments

Rejoice Calendar Geeks. There are fewer of us even than those who really understand Haskell monads. It's obvious that the Java/Calendar classes were implemented by people who were not calendar geeks. (I once implemented a date package that was usable from 4000BC to several thousand years in the future by porting some HP-48 code.)

Best of all for me, this July has 3 paydays.

Unless you get paid once a month like me.

If you get paid biweekly that happens twice a year, so its not terribly exciting. What was cool was a couple of years ago I was lucky enough to get paid (biweekly) 27 times in a year. That was exciting.

The same co-worker has a Lucite perpetual calendar on his desk. I asked him how many different calendar options it had.

"Seven."

"Doesn't it beggar belief that one of those seven would only get used once every 800 years?"

> "Seven."

Sounds like it has precisely one setting for each day of the week January 1 can fall on, which isn't sufficient to uniquely identify each possible calendar. You need fourteen settings: Two for each day, one for normal years and one for leap years.

It's a one-month perpetual calendar, not a one-year perpetual calendar.

I'm no calendar geek. I have however written production software that had to do date calculations, so wound up having to do the whole Gregorian to Julian and back conversion thing.

I was doing this before they wrote the book on it: http://www.calendarists.com

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