[Python-ideas] Please reconsider the Boolean evaluation of midnight

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Fri, Mar 07, 2014 at 03:38:02PM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
> On Fri, Mar 7, 2014 at 1:19 PM, Andrew Barnert <abarnert at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > If I were dictator of the world, I would ban DST. And 12-hour times. And MDY date formats. In fact, I would probably ban timezones. How hard would it be to learn that on the east coast you work from 0400-1200, not 9:00am-5:00pm?
> >
> 
> Fortunately, you don't have to be dictator of the whole world. As
> admin of Minstrel Hall (minstrelhall.com), I simply made the
> declaration that all campaign times would be listed in UTC. That
> effectively bans DST and timezones. 

No it doesn't. People still have to convert from the listed timezone to 
their own local timezone. The only difference is that instead of 
privileging some semi-arbitrary timezone on the basis of where your 
servers are, you're privileging an even more arbitrary timezone in 
Europe.

Depending on the distribution of your users, chances are good that 
you're actually inconveniencing more people by your decision than if you 
used the local timezone.

[...]
> Let's start creating pockets like that all over the place. Train
> people to manage international events in UTC. Eventually the benefits
> will start to be more visible :)

There are no benefits, not even to programmers, since they will still 
have to convert a local time to UTC. The only differences will be:

- people whose local time happens to be UTC won't have to do anything;

- everyone else will suffer more, as even local (to them) events will 
  need to be converted from UTC.


Really, all these (hopefully tongue-in-cheek) suggestions to ban 
timezones are as useful as those (unfortunately serious) suggestions to 
avoid all the issues with Unicode by going back to "good ol' ASCII" and 
insist that everybody write in American English.

(Actually a subset of American English, since ASCII is missing some 
common American symbols.)

-- 
Steven