For a couple of Frivolous Fridays, I've riffed on the subject "If geeks ran the world." It was meant to be nerdy, goofy fun, with maybe some wistful wishful thinking thrown in. Overall, I like to think that the world would be a better place: More logical yet more experimental, and probably more caffeinated.
But there's one point about which I'm serious. Like, global thermonuclear Armageddon serious. And that would be in how we (meaning as a planet) would learn to deal with dates and times under a geek regime, particularly when the majority of those geeks are from I/T.
At some point in your programming career--hopefully earlier than later--you realise that working with dates and times will always suck. No matter how good the language or framework or API you work with, the very best you can expect is that it will be less painful. Not because there's less inherent suckage, but because the date-time APIs provide a topical anesthetic to numb you enough to finish the job. Not unlike popping the first-string quarterback full of cortisone after a brutal sack so he can finish the game.
Boiled down to the essence, the concept of time revolved around the point when the sun was at its highest point in the sky. Dates, of course, were based off the length of day relative to the length of not-day.
Dates, at least in European history, have been an occasional pain. If you're morbidly curious, look up "Julian Calendar" and "Gregorian Calendar." Basically, from 1582 to 1918, the calendar date generally depended on who was in power in your country/territory during the late 16th century and, more importantly, how they felt about the Pope. (Exception: France tried decimalising the calendar during the Revolution...and again for a couple of weeks in 1871. I wish I were making that up.)
Which, except for cross-border contracts, will not be an issue for most folks living in an agrarian economy. At least not until the mid-19th century, when telegraph lines were strung across whole continents...and then between them. As we all appreciate, the world has been shrinking ever since.
The study of timepieces from the sundial to the atomic clock is a fun bit of nerdery, I'll grant you. (For instance, I hang an aquitaine off my belt at SCA events...and keep the wristwatch discreetly tucked under poofy Renaissance sleeves.)
You can accuse me--perhaps rightly--of too much optimism in thinking that our species will manage to stop squabbling and money-grubbing and gawping at glowing rectangular screens long enough to venture permanently into other regions of the galaxy. If and when that happens, the (occasionally wobbly) spinning of a water-logged, gas-shrouded rock in
its decaying orbit around a flaming gas-ball will cease to be relevant.
But for our immediate purposes, I don't see any practical reason why the earth can't all be on the same time, all the time. Let's say that GMT/UTC/Zulu time is the only time zone. (Yeah, I know--that means that the British can still pretend that they're the centre of the world. But it's a trade-off I'm willing to make, however much it riles my American-born-and-raised sensibilities...)
The upshot is that you break for lunch at eight a.m. in NYC and five a.m. in L.A.--is that legitimately a big deal? I'd argue not. No more having to hope that you and your client both made the same mental adjustments when you agreed on a meeting time. For programmers and their friends who keep the servers running, no having to convert everything to UTC to make stuff apples-to-apples. And, best of all, good shuttance to the pointless nuisance that is Daylight Savings Time, while we're at it.
'Course, the arm-twisting politics of making that happen will probably be even more cantankerous than the religious grudges that gave 16th - 18th century European history a lot of its uglier moments. Alexander Pope wrote "'Tis with our judgements as with our watches; none go just alike, but each believes his own." Now, identical judgements can be a terrifying thing (think mob rule) and I'm not holding out for it in a world of billions anyway. But our watches going just alike would make life easier in any number of ways. And not just for we programmers who have to write code for a 24-timezone world.
