Yeah? I once spent an entire week debugging a plaintext database because the software expected the record identifiers to be tokenized a certain way, but the original data source had spaces in those strings.

The software was the ISC DHCP server, the industry standard for decades and only EOL'd a year ago.

[–] meekah@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

Sounds like a weekend that you could have saved if the software was just implemented properly and accepted spaces.

Something being an industry standard does not necessarily mean it's good. Sometimes it just means it was the cheapest, or sometimes even just because it was used for so long. How long did it take for Torx to somewhat replace philips head screws despite being better in most cases?

I think date strings are made for human and machine readability. Similar to XML or JSON. So, why not improve systems so that we can have more human readable date strings? If you don't care about human readability and want to make sure there is no confusion with spaces, you can just use epoch timestamps.