> It makes me angry that programmers feel that they "own" the concept of time measurement enough to propose the abolition of leap seconds. The definition of unix time excluding leap seconds is really the origin of this nonsense, and it has always seemed to me that the obvious solution is computers should simply measure seconds since the epoch. Wikipedia describes this version as the "TAI-based variant" of Unix Time, and if we all used it, computers wouldn't even have to care about leap seconds, and conversion to standard time display could be done in userland, accounting for leap seconds in the process.

That's not fair to programmers: the definition of a leap second is up to an international organisation (IERS), and more importantly leap seconds added in 2020 couldn't have been known by anyone in the 1970s. Leap seconds are added only six months before they are to take effect, as per wiki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_second): "Because the Earth's rotation speed varies in response to climatic and geological events, UTC leap seconds are irregularly spaced and unpredictable."