Give everyone the ability to intuitively grasp the concept of unix timestamps.

No more timezones or DST, no more confusion about formats.

Just until we colonize another planet

@dootdoot unix timestamps would work well anywhere, they're just an abstract second counter, not linked to days or seasons.

The problem is that datetime formats are either nice and standardized but practically annoying, or easy to use but confusing/ambiguous.

DST needs to die now though.

Try to set your grandfather's birthday as Unix timestamp.
Do you see the disadvantage?

And timezones cover the aspect of human handling of time. Having just one time wouldn't change anything. Nobody would get up in the middle of the night and go to work because the clock shows 8 AM

@ddephor we could just all use UTC, still wake up at dawn, and just get used to the weird times. I think people would actually adapt fairly quickly.

@bittersweet That would make it even worse, you wouldn't know what time of day it is at a specific place on earth, creating massive confusion. Daytime is what counts for humans and it is relative to the place on earth.

The concept of day and night on earth is 4.6 billion years old and drives almost all kinds of life on earth. Measuring and processing time values is at most a few hundred years old.

Technically date and time are a pain in the ass for every programmer, but technology should be made for humans, not the other way round.

@ddephor Agreed, but I think every developer has those moments where they think "if only end users were a bit more like machines"

I have adjusted the validation on a date / time input on our webservice about six times this year, because of the crap people cram into that field.

"but don't you use a front end date selection/masking library?" — yeah, but many of our users use weird phones and browsers which turn off javascript and fall back to a default text input. "But can't you just reject everything that's not a valid date in the backend?" — yeah, but it rejects some reasonable input as well, making it annoyingly strict. "but can't you sanitize the input on the backend?" — yup... But it becomes a guessing game as to what the user meant... and now we have 30 lines of code just for an input field.

That reminds me of...😊