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Comment by testplzignore | Hacker News Reader

So what happens if an emperor dies unexpectedly? Does all Japanese calendar aware software break?

The Heisei era started in 1989 with the death of Hirohito (posthumously named Showa). Since then, there was no unexpected death of emperors. Modern software has never been put to the test.

In the sense that they'll show dates wrong, yes, though one could imagine the following era might start a few months after the death.

But essentially, software (and printed calendars!) will start showing dates with years "overflowing" the era.

Actually, it'll start just few days after the death. When last emperor died on 1989-01-07, that was the end of Syowa 64, then Heisei 1st (called Gan-nen 元年 instead of 1st) started on 1989-01-08.

Committee starts the plan of determining new era name well in advance when this is about to happen, so this is determined a several months in advance.

With this transition that taking place next year, I hear many of engineers are very annoyed for the fact they are withholding announcement of this just a month before it is changing, for the publicly stated reasoning of to "not ruin the surprise."

It's also worth noting this is the first era transition while computer systems are basically everywhere.

Actually, back in Showa-Heisei, there were plenty of the computerized system existed already. Many of these system, where they could not be patched, is "assuming" the system is still in Showa. (So the system thinks this year's Showa 93)

They will see Y2K like problem in 2025 (Showa-100) if these systems are still active somewhere (as they may not handle >99) and to less extent, same thing may happen in 2088 (Heisei-100)

I'm thinking their tendency of ground-up development of those internal systems in Japan would make this a lot more complicated.

Anything that isn't used to produce some sort of official documents should be using Western-style dates anyway. Also month, day and time stay the same regardless of the era. Only the year number gets reset to 1.

”Western-style“ dates don’t really exist: most countries use DMY, US for reasons unknown has gone with MDY, and Japan and China have officially standardised on ISO-8601 (YMD): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_format_by_country

A Western-style date refers to a date based on the Gregorian calendar, regardless of how one orders the individual components of a date.

I suspect "Western-style dates" was meant to refer to the Gregorian calendar rather than the format used to represent a date on that calendar.

ISO-8601 only really applies to the Gregorian calendar.

YMD is the only sane format. When you sort, you can sort by the year, followed by month and day. I do this a lot with folder names or log file names in directories, file system creation/modified dates don't always match reality. e.g. a folder named 2018-01-07 is entirely readable to anyone who looks at it, but at the same time easily sorted.

And DMY is the only sane human-readable format for LTR languages.

When you write the time, do you put the minutes to the left or the right of the hour?

I think that the timescale on which humans live matters here. The year field doesn't change often, so for the everyday usecase it's kind of redundant – it's probably the current year, so specifying it first is kind of noisy[1]. But on the scale of hours, it's the minutes that are noise, because you likely care more about the hour. So I guess the most ergonomic ordering depends on the usecase.

[1] This could be different if you're, say, browsing an archive. Still, if I'm looking at a thread from 2005, that context is in my head, and I don't need to be constantly reminded of that by seeing 2005-XX-YY.

In English, at least, it used to be that a document such as a letter would begin with a date indicating when it was written, and then for dates ±1 month from that date would express relatively, like so:

* "The 10th instant" / "10th inst." = tenth day of current month indicated in date of document

* "The 10th ultimo" / "10th ult." = tenth day of month preceding the one indicated in date of document

* "The 10th proximo" / "10th prox." = tenth day of month following the one indicated in date of document

Arabic often writes dates and phone numbers from left to right. I can't speak for other RTL langauges but I can't see DMY being a problem for most people around the world. Ultimately, non-English speakers have to learn English to write code and if they want standardised dates across their systems they should use the standard of the language they're writing in.

Okay, there's what the date _is_ (on what calendar, what system of reckoning dates?), and there's how you serialize it.

(month: July; day-of-month: 2; year: 2018) -- can be serialized (written) a variety of ways, ISO-8601 Y-M-D being one of them.

However (month: July; day-of-month: 2; year: Heisei 30) is a different story, not just a question of serialization.

(month: Tamus; day-of-month: 19; year: 5778) -- yet more different.

(month: Shawwal; day-of-month: 18; year:1439)

"Western style dates" above means "the Gregorian calendar". Yes, how you write or serialize it for machine-parsing can be another issue. But dates on _another calendar altogether_ is a bigger one. Although the Japanese calendar that just has a different name for the year, but the months and dates and beginning and ends of the year are synchornized with gregorian -- not as big as the "Hebrew" or "Islamic" calendars which have entirely different months and years with boundaries unrelated to the gregorian calendars'.

"Western-style dates" is a literal translation of "西暦(seireki)", which people use to refer to the Gregorian calendar in Japanese.

Thanks, that adds the necessary context.

That‘s what Microsoft is users helping to find out.

As the article states, for most of computing‘s history (and certainly all of consumer‘s computing history) there hasn‘t been an era change, yet.

From centuries ago emperors could decrete new eras, and in the last centuries it was rationalized as one emperor reign = one era. So when the new emperor will be enthroned, he will take its emperor name that also will become the era new era name. How the previous emperor exit the throne (death or abdication) is irrelevant.

He's talking about the software patching issue. If the emperor dies today, how do you update all software to understand the name of the new year?

The succession itself is pretty straightforward; people will see it on the news and memorize the new name immediately. Software is more difficult, though.

This is not really a new issue. Daylight savings time rules change, leap seconds are added and removed. Most software doesn't care because someone will notice and change the clock, or NTP notices that your clock is a second slow because you forgot the leap second and it moves it forward. But being a second or an hour off is a slightly different problem than not knowing what the current year is called, or how to add/subtract years.

Software that wants to be resilient to any of these changes simply uses a timebase that doesn't have leap seconds, daylight savings time, or the year changing... but users want to see "Heisei 30" and not something that is 37 seconds ahead of what their wall clock says the time is. Formatting the time is still an issue no matter what timebase you use.

> If the emperor dies today, how do you update all software to understand the name of the new year?

I understood the question but it is pointless: how can you expect software to be magically patched if no update mecanism is in place? Some will, others won’t.

You understood the literal question, but not the motivation and thus not the real question.

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