Years and days are both reasonable periods to track and while some other system of tracking which day we are on is easy to imagine, the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with (it's 2 numbers...).
Two units totally unrelated, one of which is basically random in progression (30 / 28 / 31 spread unevenly across the year) and the other matches only one of the other three (and is also non-humane to track). Adding to the problem, you are forced to use at least one of these weird units, because nobody knows which day of the year it is - it's either "day of month" or "day of week".
How often do you really need to know what day of the week a specific date in 40 years will fall on?
The current system will stand, because however irrational it is, it is good enough.
Not to mention, people don't like things that aren't classified. I think there would be a lot of people that didn't like having day 365 (and 366) be unclassified as days. That is another hack that would probably end up doing more harm than good. How would you model that extra day (or two)? You wouldn't have (13) 4 week months. You'd have (13) 4 week months, plus (1) one-day or two-day month. Hardly an elegant system worth changing for.
>The current system will stand, because however irrational it is, it is good enough.
Exactly like a broken but popular API. It's still fundamentally bad.
>Not to mention, people don't like things that aren't classified. I think there would be a lot of people that didn't like having day 365 (and 366) be unclassified as days.
I think we'd all be relieved to have a separate classification space for leap days (29 February is an abomination) and other adjustments we might have to add here and there. We could dedicate these days to generic "spiritual and religious celebrations" to make traditionalists happy, call it "Holy Month" or something. It's a very subjective judgement anyway, one way or the other.
>You'd have (13) 4 week months, plus (1) one-day or two-day month. Hardly an elegant system worth changing for.
> Exactly like a broken but popular API. It's still fundamentally bad.
And yet, not bad enough to @deprecate.
> Still much more elegant that the current mess
I'd argue that it's just as much of a hack... if there was something that was obviously better, I'd be all for it, but this is just a different mess. I'd rather deal with the devil I know...
We could dedicate these days to generic "spiritual and religious celebrations" to make traditionalists happy, call it "Holy Month" or something.
I can't tell if that's a serious suggestion, but if it is, I don't think that'd be very helpful. I'm trying to imagine which religion is standing around waiting for some benevolent calendar dictator to free up a couple new days in the year so they can implement a new tradition. :-D
Religions will stick their holy days on the calendar quite apart from your classification of them as holy. Provided you're not removing any capability for them to continue celebrating their current holidays, I don't think they're looking for any special consideration on the calendar front.
I'm Italian: every given day most of my fellow nationals are supposed to celebrate this or that saint... the Catholic Church is always more than happy to extend its cultural hegemony by attaching itself to celebrations of any sort, I'd be surprised if other confessions were very different on that front - there's always a scripture or an event that you can use to celebrate a specific day of the year. Even Christmas has not always fallen on the 25th day of the 12th month of the year, after all.
Any calendar reform unfortunately has to deal with this backward-compatibility nightmare with religious tradition, which doomed most previous attempts; hence my parent comment.
Weekdays shift by 1 every year (365 mod 7 = 1), and once more every leap year (366 mod 7 = 2). May 4, 2014 is Sunday. In 40 years there will be 10 extra leap years so the total shift is 50 mod 7 = 1, so May 4, 2054 is a Monday.
Off the top of my head, I have no idea. Finding out takes a minute (I can't think of all that many situations where I would need to know but not be able to arrange some reference that turned that minute into seconds).
