The French Revolution - making life easy for programmers

Happy 30th Messidor, citoyennes et citoyens!!

(Tomorrow’s the 1st Thermidor CCXV)

If I ever get the time, I’ll launch a (doomed) campaign to adopt the Revolutionary Calendar into our daily lives.

360 days, divided into 12 months x 30 days - plus 5/6 festival days at the end of the years - “sans-culottides” for the benefit of us sans-culottes, proles and plebians. (Plus 3 x 10 day weeks to a month and decimal time!)

The - maybe - clever thing is that for work/business/commercial purposes the holidays would not exist, and would not need to be included into the programming of commercial transactions.

Buy 6 months of web hosting on the 16th Vendémiaire - it ends on the 16th Germinal, no arithmetic necessary. Ok, people would start to get clever about start dates but we’d all be on holiday and not looking at web sites during their extra free time, so that wouldn’t be a big deal.

Why not? - usually to their own benefit, ad people run their Net30 day terms & conditions, and few rise up in Bastille-storming revolt about this.

It would discomfit large commercial interests - a good thing.

Vast amounts of calendar-handling code could be junked, and never need to be painstakingly written and debugged again - a very good thing.

So….. it’s not going to happen - I may have to go for plan B - which is Christmas once every 4 years, much better…