The standard trope when talking about timezones is to rattle off falsehoods programmers believe about them. These lists are only somewhat enlightening – it’s really hard to figure out what truth is just from the contours of falsehood.
So here’s an alternative approach. I’m gonna show you some weird timezones. In fact, the weirdest timezones. They’re each about as weird as timezones are allowed to get in some way.
To learn how their weirdness is represented in software, we’ll look at the raw timezone files that all software ultimately relies on. From there, two things will become clear:
Oh yeah the OCR on Japanese driving licenses pops out things like “平成 8”, that’s just how they sometimes say 1996 over there. That’s why we have this in the parser:
We’re gonna need to set up a per-country feature flag when deciding whether banks are closed for Eid. Saudi Arabia and Iran don’t agree on when the lunar month starts.