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Watch out for the Calendar Geeks

blog.plover.com
24 pointssheffield7 comments
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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.

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.

Unless you get paid once a month like me.

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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