Maybe a naive question but why wasn't the timestamp designed as seconds since the epoch with zero adjustments?
Everything would be derived from that.
I suppose it would make some math more complex but overall it feels simpler.
Everything would be derived from that.
I suppose it would make some math more complex but overall it feels simpler.
The problem is leap seconds. Software just wasn't designed to handle 86401 seconds in a day, and caused incidents at Google, Cloudflare, Quantus, and others. Worried that resolving all possible bugs related to days with 86401 seconds in them was going to be impossible to get right, Google decided to smear that leap second so that the last "second" isn't.
And if you've not seen it, there's the falsehoods programmers believe about time article.
I guess they just didn't foresee the problem, or misjudged the impact. I can imagine it being very "let's kick that problem down the road and just do a simple thing for now" approach.
Random example, the wonderful RealTime1987A project (https://bmonreal.github.io/RealTime1987A/) talks about detecting neutrinos from the supernova, and what information can be inferred from the timing of the detections. A major source of that data is the Super Kamiokande project. The data was recorded to tape by a PDP-11, timestamped by its local clock. That clock was periodically synced with UTC with a sophisticated high-tech procedure that consisted of an operator making a phone call to some time service, then typing the time into the computer. As such, the timestamps recorded by this instrument have error bars of something like +/- one minute.
If that’s the sort of world you’re in, trying to account for leap seconds probably seems like a complete waste of effort and precious computer memory.