The OP author seems to be conflating multiple things under the "time zone" term too.<p>Localities (countries, cities, areas) have <i>official standard time</i> that, to interpret, depends on the point in history (calendar adjustments, DST, leap seconds...). Finding official standard time for any given person anywhere in the world and at any point in history is a hard problem. But it seems they are not trying to solve that general problem.<p>Time zones, specifically, usually refer to a relatively straightforward concept: "zones" where time matches, usually given using a time offset (most commonly hourly) from the UTC+0000 (closely related to GMT). "Eastern Standard Time" is a localised (to the USA) name for a time zone that would sound totally foreign to anyone not regularly setting up meetings with Americans. Most people would probably think "what time is in the USA right now?" is a non-ambiguous question.<p>But that ambiguity is exactly what OP wants to solve. It's more of a NLP problem where the context is simply missing ("what's Colorado Springs time?" is a perfectly valid question to ask, just like time zone monikers would be translated everywhere English is not a native language: majority of the world). Even if there were any better standards than IANA, they would not help with implementing a better algorithm, since there is no real need for everyone to learn any official timezone names, and they'd still refer to them using whatever local name there is.<p>It's important to remember what the goal of "time zones" is. It is to simplify time keeping and cross-referencing between people who come in <i>regular contact.</i> The only true time is astronomical time, but if a person 20mi/30km away was up to 1 minute off (depending on the direction), it would make any coordination very hard. Sure, we're seeing changes in how often people come into regular contact across timezones, but I don't think we are at a tipping point where everyone needs to adjust just yet.<p>Developing tools for those who do is sure welcome, so I invite the author to get their terminology (and goal) a bit clarified :)
I felt like everything was at least tolerable up until I read this:<p>> In a particularly memorable example, a few years ago the Samoan islands wanted to be on the other side of the international date line to get the same weekends as their Australian trading partners. So on midnight Dec 29th, they changed their UTC offset from -11 to +13 UTC, skipping Dec 30th and going straight to Dec 31st.<p>How you could program your way out of that, and plan around that as a possibility in scheduling/calendars, is a bit mind bendy. "Turns out this day won't exist for you" is never something I'd have considered a possibility.
Maybe we should bring back Swatch Internet Time <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time</a>
Are these falsehoods "programmers" believe about timezones or just falsehoods this one guy had about timezones. Most of these 'misconceptions' would never have occurred to me to think.
This was a wild ride like one of those topical wendover/rll YouTube videos. Another oddity I’ve noticed is that some large countries have decided to have a single time zone(with small exceptions), like India, China, and Turkey and society seems to still function. Judging by their size I wonder what it would mean if all of the US were in one time zone.
The conversations happening on reddit:
<a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jggx3l/falsehoods_programmers_believe_about_time_zones/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/jggx3l/falseho...</a>
One thing I miss about Skype is being able to see the local time of the person you were taking to, right there under their name.<p>Maybe I'm a fringe case, but even though my company only exists in two timezones this difference still affects me every day on Slack...