“Falsehoods programmers believe about time” is InfiniteUndo’s riff on Patrick McKenzie’s classic Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names. It’s quite an eye-popping and mindbending riff on the malleability of time inside the world of computers, where a minute can last longer than an hour, where clients and servers may disagree about the time by an order of decades, and where production systems might routinely change timezones.
20. Time has no beginning and no end.
21. One minute on the system clock has exactly the same duration as one minute on any other clock
22. Ok, but the duration of one minute on the system clock will be pretty close to the duration of one minute on most other clocks.
23. Fine, but the duration of one minute on the system clock would never be more than an hour.
24. You can’t be serious.
Falsehoods programmers believe about time
(via Making Light)
(Image: CASIO 593 A163WA-1QGF wristwatch, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from andresrueda’s photostream)