The matter of time()
As software engineers, we all rely on the notion of time: a crucial concept in ensuring that events in our programs follow a chronological order. Yet, invoking a simple call to “get the current time” can potentially yield unexpected results and lead to unforeseen consequences if not used correctly. Moreover, the invariants about time we observe on our local development machine may not necessarily hold in the cloud, or in any distributed system.
In this article, I’ll go through the different ways we can obtain the current time in our programs, and present cases where our intuitions and expectations of time from these clocks may mislead us at best or cause catastrophic failures at worst.
What would be the biological reality of planet earth rotating once every eighteen hours instead of twenty-four? You have less time, but you have more days in the year. So there’s a sense of losing something, and also gaining something. With an 18-hour clock there’s a lot more yesterdays.
Let me start by asking you six questions. Here is a set of code snippets. Is it possible that the expression passed to isThisPossible is true? Take a guess.
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