Fallacies are failures of logical reasoning; lies are deceptions. THEY ARE DIFFERENT. It’s fallacious to believe that fallacies are the same as lies. It’s a lie to say that they are the same when in fact you know that they are not.
I’m sorry, but isn’t this a rather basic distinction that anyone involved in public English-language discourse should know? Are you over-correcting for the New York Times’ (and other publications’) failure to correctly label Trump’s lies as lies? The fact is, these aren’t lies about calendars; the author of the list correctly titled it “Calendrical Fallacies.”
Agreed, and important distinction. And if we’re talking tone here, why not just “Calendrical Fallacies Programmers Must Learn to Avoid!” or something else more affirmative. It avoids the awkward suggestions that programmers are more likely than others to misunderstand these than non-programmers, and that all programmers believe these fallacies, which is also clearly not true…
This is interesting to me, because I’m fascinated by how we (I’d wager it’s true for most folks, even if unconsciously) attempt to manage how others think and how they perceive us, by our word choices. I thought the headline saying “lies” was click-baity—because most of us (I think) have a strong reaction to the idea of lies—for the most part, we do not want to be lied to!
However, I wondered if Cory may have meant it in the sense that programmers are lying to themselves—i.e., they know it’s a fallacy, but they conveniently ignore it (in other words, they lie to themselves about it) in order not to deal with the complications necessitated by working with the truth.
Then, I looked up definitions of “lie” and found that Google says, among other definitions:
used with reference to a situation involving deception or founded on a mistaken impression.
“all their married life she had been living a lie”
and Google’s definition of “fallacy” includes:
a mistaken belief, especially one based on unsound argument.
From those, I could easily equate “fallacy” with “founded on a mistaken impression”, and that made me feel more tolerant of Cory’s use of the word “lie”.
I note that the original source (davedelong) doesn’t use the words “lie” or “lies”, but it does use the words “false” and “true”, which many of us (I think) associate with the concept of lying. So I guess I can see how Cory got there.
Still, I think it’s click-baity, and I like @HMSGoose’s suggestion for making it more affirmative!
They are more ignorance then lies. Many things in software (and hardware) seem simple in theory - but that’s just because you don’t know any better.
I remember fixing a scheduling bug that happened because the original programmer didn’t account for “holy shit you mean the Gregorian calendar isn’t used universally?” and things got really weird when the program was run in places where the Islamic calendar is used and the current year is 1440.
Of all the ways to count in that language (A LOT), counting days of the month felt like the most arduous with the most weird exceptions.
ETA: Counting in Japanese sucks. The red/orange entries are irregular from the normal pattern, and there’s no pattern of irregularity. You just have to memorize it rote.
Goodness, yes. I remember taking Japanese language classes and simply being baffled by how many ways there were to count the quantity of something. It still baffles me. “Haha, you used the counting system for cylinders rather than round things. Stupid gaijin.” And how the words for 1-10 for things differ from generic 1-10 counting which differs from how dates are counted. Why are some dates counted with normal numbers and others special? Because fuck you, that’s why.
And when I was studying in Japan, they didn’t do me any favors. I learned to use the right counter when ordering things so I could sound more like a native speaker. Because when I ordered with the wrong counter (or just general ich-ni-san) they would repeat it back to me with the counter.
So what do people at shops do when I start ordering with the right counter that they always correct me with? They repeat it back to me using either ich-ni-san, or hitotsu-hutatsu-mitsu. Goddammit, which way do you want me to say it??
Yes, because I would need at least one other piece of information (location, sunrise time, sunset time) in order to understand how late in the day these are. Are you writing in the afternoon or dinner time? are you going to work at tea time or at night? With a shared frame of reference that timezones give us (however imperfect) I understand what that time means to you.
You already need this information with time zones. If I say 5pm what does that mean to you? Does what it mean to you mean the same thing to me?
If I say 5pm to one of my colleagues in our Melbourne office I view it as being rude. Did I mean my 5pm or their 5pm? To have a meaningful dialog I already must include that one other piece of information that localizes the meaning of the time. you can guess at what I meant and you could probably make a correct guess most of the time, but leaving things ambiguous when it is trivial to prevent is not a good way to communicate.
In a multi time zone system leaving off any time zone qualifier has the risk of causing the other party to completely miss what ever event was supposed to happen at that time.
In a single time zone leaving off any regional qualifier has the risk of you misunderstanding what time of day it is for someone else.
Am I talking to one of my friends that does day work or one of my friends that is a Nurse? If it’s the latter I need to know what schedule she is on this rotation, it could be breakfast time at 3 in the afternoon.
Time zones are already insufficient to the task you have lauded for them for, even if only in a minority of cases.
This assumes that we couldn’t come up with a social construct to replace time zones in common speech. Maybe “My day is 5 hours behind standard time”.
This is like arguing that we can’t replace the Imperial system with Metric/SI because then people would know how cold it is outside without degrees Fahrenheit being quoted in weather reports. Changing the scale doesn’t change the thing the scale measures.
Again, one of my core points is that a lot of resistance to this idea, and the arguments against it assume that our learned behaviors would be broken. I argue that these behaviors would need nothing but a minor change that would become second nature and effectively forgotten within a generation.
How about a truth programmers believe about calendars: “Someone has already put much more thought into this than I am willing to do. Let’s use their library.”
It sounds like you want the common frame of reference to be the 24 hr clock fixed to that 5PM is the same wherever you are and regardless of where in the day/night cycle you happen to be.
The thing is, the actual shared frame of reference is the day/night cycle and is one we’ve spent tens of thousands of years adapting to. It’s only relatively recently that we’ve gained the ability to travel fast enough to make this problematic.
It may be that if/when we become multi-planetary and the length of a day/night cycle is no longer a unifying metric then things may shift towards your idea, but mostly it just reminds me of the French Republican Calendar.
In other words, even if time travel is physically possible after all, we’ll never have a working time machine because it will turn out impossible to write the OS and software needed to run it.
