Excel is so embedded into our world that we renamed part of the human genome to prevent excel from incorrectly reading them as dates<p><a href="https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-rename-microsoft-excel-misreading-dates" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/6/21355674/human-genes-renam...</a>
In other "incorrect calendars" bugs, there's the Rockchip RK808 RTC, where the engineers thought that November had 31 days, needing a Linux kernel patch to this day that translates between Gregorian and Rockchip calendars (which are gradually diverging over time).<p>Also one of my favourite kernel patch messages: <a href="https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=f076ef44a44d02ed91543f820c14c2c7dff53716" rel="nofollow">https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin...</a>.
My favorite: For one day all the Microsoft Zunes froze for the entire day, only to recover on their own 24 hours later when the infinite loop in their leap year code had finally resolved: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20090313105752/http://www.zuneboards.com/forums/zune-news/38143-cause-zune-30-leapyear-problem-isolated.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20090313105752/http://www.zunebo...</a>
To be fair, that's nowhere near as daft as september, october, november, december. Latin for seven, eight, nine, and ten is: septem, octem, novem, decem. Those are the nineth, 10th, 11th and 12th months.<p>Edit: Whoops, correct eng -> latin nums
You may know this but originally they were 'correct' because the start of the year was March.
Which wouldn't be that weird, except that the earliest Roman calendar started in March and ended in December, having only 10 months!<p>The Romans were of course well aware that this left a gap of about two months between the end of one year in December, and the beginning of the next year in March. But they just didn't bother counting this period as part of the calendar year. Presumably because there was no agricultural reason to need accurate dates during winter.
No? How is it octem and not octo? Does the flat bar accent do something?<p><i>>The Latin word for "eight" is
octō.</i> [0]<p>[0] asked google
"I hate that SEPTember OCTOber NOVember and DECember aren't the7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months."<p>"Whoever f---ed this up should be stabbed."<p>"I have <i>excellent</i> news for you."
An interesting read related to this bug from Joel Spolsky - <i>My First BillG Review</i>: <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-review/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...</a>
The story behind this is one of the best backward compatibility parables in computing. Lotus 1-2-3 originally made the mistake, and when Microsoft built Excel they deliberately reproduced it so that Lotus spreadsheets would import with correct dates. Fixing it now would silently shift every date serial number in every saved spreadsheet by one day -- and you can't safely make that change because you don't know how many downstream systems depend on those serial numbers being exactly what they are.<p>It's the same pattern that keeps x86 booting in real mode, keeps JavaScript's == doing type coercion, and keeps POSIX using null-terminated strings. Once a bug lives in enough production systems, it stops being a bug and becomes an interface contract. The cost of correctness exceeds the cost of the error, so the error becomes the standard.
> Applies to: Microsoft Excel for Mac 2011, Excel for Microsoft 365 for Mac, Microsoft Office Excel 2003, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Excel 2010, Excel 2013, Excel 2016
This obligates me to share this absolute gem of date/time history folklore: <a href="https://neosmart.net/forums/threads/an-extended-history-of-time-the-calendar.2851/" rel="nofollow">https://neosmart.net/forums/threads/an-extended-history-of-t...</a>
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