# How to Think About Time

<https://errorprone.info/docs/time>

- Host: [errorprone.info](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/hosts/errorprone.info/)
- Saved: December 12, 2024 (2024-12-12T13:10:53Z)
- Record: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/e3ac56bd6fe8/
- JSON: https://links.thingelstad.xyz/links/e3ac56bd6fe8.json

## What Jamie wrote

This article does a great job highlighting how complicated the basic matter of time is while programming. For non-programmers it is an interesting read to go deeper on why this is much more complex than one may think. For programmers this document is a culmination of best practices developed to avoid bugs in time based logic in software. The differentiation between "physical time" and "civil time" is an interesting one.

> Civil time is the patchwork of made-up human concepts such as “months”, “common era”, “leap days”, “weekend”, “cold November rain”, and so on.
> 
> Civil time is very important. It makes communication easier, and enables us to organize our daily lives in a reasonable way. And no one is going to bake you any special cake or sing you any excruciatingly bland song off-key while you exhale rapidly onto flaming wax if we don’t have civil time.
> 
> Civil time always requires a calendar system.

Fun stuff.

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT305: Weekly Thing 305 / Lighthouse, Willow, Artemis](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/305/), Notable

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## Elsewhere

- Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://errorprone.info/docs/time