How to Think About Time in Programming

Time is a mess. Always. The author only scratched the surface on all the issues. Even if we exclude the time dilation of relativity which affects GPS/GNSS satellites - independent of if it is due to difference in gravitational pull or their relative speed over ground, it's still a mess.

Timezones; sure. But what about before timezones got into use? Or even halfway through - which timezone, considering Königsberg used CET when it was part of Germany, but switched to EET after it became Russian. There's even countries that have timezones differenting by 15 minutes.

And dont get me started on daylight savings time. There's been at least one instance where DST was - and was not - in use in Lebanon - at the same time! Good luck booking an appointment...

Not to mention the transition from Julian calendar to Gregorian, which took place over many, many years - different by different countries - as defined by the country borders at that time...

We've even had countries that forgot to insert a leap day in certain years, causing March 1 to occur on different days altogether for a couple of years.

Time is a mess. Is, and aways have been, and always will be.

Author covers how IANA handles Königsberg, it is logically its own timezone.

  An IANA timezone uniquely refers to the set of regions that not only share the same current rules and projected future rules for civil time, but also share the same history of civil time since 1970-01-01 00:00+0. In other words, this definition is more restrictive about which regions can be grouped under a single IANA timezone, because if a given region changed its civil time rules at any point since 1970 in a a way that deviates from the history of civil time for other regions, then that region can't be grouped with the others

I agree that time is a mess. And the 15 minute offsets are insane and I can't fathom why anyone is using them.

zoneinfo does in practice hold the historical info before 1970 when it can do so easily in its framework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTC%2B01:24

  % zdump -i Europe/Warsaw | head
  
  TZ="Europe/Warsaw"
  - - +0124 LMT
  1880-01-01 00 +0124 WMT
  1915-08-04 23:36 +01 CET
  1916-05-01 00 +02 CEST 1
  1916-10-01 00 +01 CET
  1917-04-16 03 +02 CEST 1
  1917-09-17 02 +01 CET
  1918-04-15 03 +02 CEST 1
  % zdump -i Europe/Kaliningrad | head -20
  
  TZ="Europe/Kaliningrad"
  - - +0122 LMT
  1893-03-31 23:38 +01 CET
  1916-05-01 00 +02 CEST 1
  1916-10-01 00 +01 CET
  1917-04-16 03 +02 CEST 1
  1917-09-17 02 +01 CET
  1918-04-15 03 +02 CEST 1
  1918-09-16 02 +01 CET
  1940-04-01 03 +02 CEST 1
  1942-11-02 02 +01 CET
  1943-03-29 03 +02 CEST 1
  1943-10-04 02 +01 CET
  1944-04-03 03 +02 CEST 1
  1944-10-02 02 +01 CET
  1945-04-02 03 +02 CEST 1
  1945-04-10 00 +02 EET
  1945-04-29 01 +03 EEST 1
  1945-10-31 23 +02 EET
  %