Japan is scrambling to reconcile systems with imperial calendar
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17430085
From the MSDN article:
> The Japanese Calendar has Japanese Era Names that coincide with the reign of the Emperor. For most of the modern age of computing that has been the Heisei era, however the Emperor is expected to step down on April 30, 2019. Which will bring about the beginning of a new era. Fortunately, this is a rare event, however it means that most software has not been tested to ensure that it will behave with an additional era.
> The magnitude of this event on computing systems using the Japanese Calendar may be similar to the Y2K event with the Gregorian Calendar. For the Y2K event, there was world-wide recognition of the upcoming change, resulting in governments and software vendors beginning to work on solutions for that problem several years before 1 Jan 2000. Even with that preparation many organizations encountered problems due to the millennial transition.
I swear there was an HN thread about a language-specific implementation (Java? Ruby?) of calendar, which included having to deal with the Japanese epoch change.
For things like Y2K, you could have done your deployment and testing long before it happened - for this change, everyone has just this one month to wait for any vendors involved to finalize, test and distribute their updates so that they can start deploying them on their own systems. No programming language or calendar library version older than March 31, 2019 could include proper support for Japanese dates of May.
Yeah, I was wondering about this line in the article:
> Officials compounded the problem by keeping the new era’s name secret until April 1, just one month before the transition.
Is there any reason, specific to Japanese tradition/convention/bureaucracy to keep the name of the era secret until one month before the actual change? When is the era name actually decided on, and how soon after the abdication of the current emperor?
Yes.
As a foreign (non-Japanese) company, we just used the western-style date almost everywhere except for published documents to skirt this problem. Doing the wrong Japanese thing would have earned us serious hostility from the Japanese business press, but foreigners doing dates the foreign way would tolerated as mere foreignness.
From the other perspective, the only unique part about Japan is that they use a name for the calendar.
"Because you're a woman and women can't do that" - "Why?" - "Because they can't." is what it boils down to.
Now for a more interesting stroll through Canon Law:
(1) The pope is the Bishop of Rome, and is (always) already a bishop (but if not, is immediately ordained as a bishop (Can. 332)[1]).
(2) Only men who have had the sacraments of baptism and confirmation (Can. 1033)[2] can receive the sacrament of ordination (Can. 1024)[3] and thus be bishops.
This has been reaffirmed (in 1994-1995)[4][5] as being part of the deposit of faith (i.e. Dogma).
In addition, anyone who tries to confer a sacred order to a woman (and the woman in question) are latae sententiae (implicitly) excommunicated.[6]
[1] http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/_P16.HTM
[2] http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/_P3R.HTM
[3] http://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG1104/_P3P.HTM
[4] http://w2.vatican.va/content/john-paul-ii/en/apost_letters/1...
[5] http://www.ourladyswarriors.org/teach/ordisace2.htm
[6] http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/docum...
Of course, there's still the legend of Pope Joan[7]
Then again, this transition is also highly unusual because the emperor abdicated, allowing time to prepare. It's the first time in the modern era that this happened, as all previous (recent) emperors have died on the throne.
How many different ways were dates marked "Heisei" displayed? I suspect it would actually be easy to finalize changes using a placeholder string, and just update to the actual era name when it was announced.
The code point was already reserved in unicode 11.0, so you could even just the unicode code point.
Because every other part of the change can be implemented without reference to what the era name happens to be.
I don't think that's correct. The same way we handle timezone updates via external data source in most languages/libraries, we don't need to update the language itself to handle the new era. This could be done by preparing the code to handle changes and then publishing just the common database update which includes a new "(date) (era)" entry.
https://blogs.oracle.com/java-platform-group/a-new-japanese-...