April fool of programming?

2004 April 1 at 09:57 » Tagged as :datetime, sinclair,

what I am about to say is not an April Fool's joke - I am the April fool. The term "April Fool" was initially used to refer to individuals who were unaware of the Julian calendar.

I have been programming for nearly seventeen years now. (That's right 17 years). I am still a lame old newbie when it comes to date and time functions in the handful of programming languages that i use.

Over the years i have dabbled in many of them ranging from a BASIC on a Spectrum, through ANSI C to all three flavours of Java (J2SE, J2ME, J2EE). There was a run in with fortran while I did a small research into quantum mechanics at university. There has also been a little bit of C++ programming. Over the past few years, I have worked with several other programming languages, including Perl, JavaScript, PHP, and even ASP. Despite my experience, I have never truly mastered the date/time functions in any of them, except for those in SQL, where I have some proficiency. Surprisingly, my knowledge of this area in Java, for which I am a Sun Certified Java Programmer, is my weakest point. It is undoubtedly my Achilles' heel.