reverendsteveii , 6 months ago (edited 6 months ago)

I just spent two days debugging a reporting endpoint that takes in two MM-YYYY parameters and tries to pull info between the first day of the month for param1 and the last day of the month for param2 and ended up having to set my date boundaries as

LocalDate startDate = new LocalDate(1, param1.getMonth(), param2.getYear()); //pretty straightforward, right?

//bump month by one, account for rollover, set endDate to the first of that month, then subtract one day

int endMonth = param2.month == 12 ? param2.month + 1 : 1;

LocalDate endDate = new LocalDate(1, endMonth, param2.year).minusDays(1);

This is extraordinarily simply for humans to understand intuitively, but to code it requires accounting for a bunch of backward edge/corner case garbage. The answer, of course, is to train humans to think in Unix epoch time.