tz VS edn

A link was added from "Europe/Kiev" to "Europe/Kyiv" in the included-by-default backward file [0], so that any user that doesn't exclude that file will simply treat the old name as an alias for the new name.

[0] https://github.com/eggert/tz/commit/e13e9c531fc48a04fb8d064a...

timeZone: Determines the current timezone to use to display the time e.g. America/Los_Angeles. Full list can be found on IANA time zone database

"Eire" is in there, for instance, to deal with software that assumes that the "is_dst" half of the year is during the (northern) summer, but Ireland technically does it the other way around -- a distinction relevant only to computers.

https://github.com/eggert/tz/blob/c3e966c59b02b1f47f0b7b0e4a...

The only other timezone that currently has a non-1h offset for DST -- Ireland's is -1 hours -- is Australia/Lord_Howe, which has a 30-min positive leap.

Prof Paul Eggert is currently the editor and coordinator of the Time Zone Database of IANA, which enables timestamps on official documents and photos.

I've looked at it, but wanted to work with the tz source repository directly (I think local-time gets their zone files from Ubuntu). Also getting zic running in a portable way seemed too much of a hassle. The text file format is not all that complicated and documented in the zic manual pretty well. This approach is also chosen by the JDK as far as I can tell.

Subscribe to tz-announce for more fun: https://www.iana.org/time-zones

Unfortunately, you just wait. The person(s) at IANA who manages The Time Zone Database is certainly aware, and from there it "just" has to percolate down to Google and your phone.

most systems use https://www.iana.org/time-zones

And have you looked at the TZ database? My God it's a hot mess, and for good reason: human governments are terrible at creating code. Worse even than beginning CS students, because at least CS students know they don't know what they're doing, while politicians are both stupid and arrogant enough to think they're not stupid.

> was utterly surprised how no one ever apparently has thought to create a configuration/templating system that's basically a fancy library on top of Scheme.

There's Clojure's extensible data notation: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

A thin language layer around edn/datalog, the query language

EDN (Extensible Data Notation) is a subset of Clojure: https://github.com/edn-format/edn

It is:

- Streamable

- Extensible

- Whitespace-insensitive, but there are formatting conventions for readability

To begin with, EDN is somewhat like the JSON of Clojure. And regarding the code is data/data is code nature of Clojure, it is Clojure. It doesn't have some of the vagaries of JSON, and it is also extensible.

Alien is not a reason something is bad, just that's it's unusual. JSON was a bit alien when it first arrived as well, as everyone was used to XML at the time.

`{num 5, val 4}` looks fine to me, but we can do even better! We already know objects/maps are always in pairs, so we don't really need that comma either. Just do `{num 5 val 4}` and we save yet another unnecessary characters.

Of course, I didn't come up with this format myself, what I actually want JSON to be is EDN (https://github.com/edn-format/edn) which is a standalone format but also directly used in Clojure, so it already exists inside a programming language and works very well. There keys are strings though, so you example would end up being `{"num" 5 "val" 5 "person" var}`, where commas are optional.

I just checked out the spec, and it gets pretty ugly in the Table section. A lot of the json examples are both shorter and IMO more precise. Stuff that’s not allowed with [table] is allowed with [[table]], and it’s confusing to understand what level of depth I’m at.

I’ll take edn over any of “em. https://github.com/edn-format/edn

As XT is written in Clojure and it natively supports Clojure’s data types, we were not satisfied with available JSON types and decided to give EDN a try - that way we would have way more supported types:

Compare the nightmare that is pickling with how simple it is to serialize pure data with edn in clojure. What ends up happening is people passing around JSONs or whatever and writing parsing/encoding code at each end, which makes things unnecessarily more complex, and dangerous, and error prone, and boring, etc...