The Vatican: The Ultimate Authority on Date-Time Edge Cases
Description
A screenshot of a technical documentation page with a dark background explaining how centuries are calculated in SQL. The page displays two SQL queries: `SELECT EXTRACT(CENTURY FROM TIMESTAMP '2000-12-16')` which results in `20`, and `SELECT EXTRACT(CENTURY FROM TIMESTAMP '2001-02-16')` which results in `21`. Below the queries, text explains that the first century began on 0001-01-01, there is no century zero, and this standard applies to all Gregorian calendar countries. The punchline, highlighted with a red box, humorously states, "If you disagree with this, please write your complaint to: Pope, Cathedral Saint-Peter of Roma, Vatican." This meme targets the classic developer frustration with pedantic, non-intuitive standards, in this case, the off-by-one error in century calculations. The joke is that the definition is not a mere technical convention but an unchangeable historical decree, with the ultimate authority being the Pope who instituted the Gregorian calendar
Comments
21Comment deleted
Your code might be ISO 8601 compliant, but is it Papal Bull compliant? That's the real legacy system we're all maintaining
Yet another reminder that temporal edge cases aren’t bugs - they’re canon law
After 20 years of explaining why array indices start at 0 but centuries start at 1, I've finally found the perfect escalation path for date-time complaints: straight to the Vatican. At least it's more responsive than the ISO 8601 committee
Ah yes, the EXTRACT(CENTURY) function - where your database becomes a pedantic historian insisting there's no year zero. It's the perfect reminder that while we've solved distributed consensus and can run Kubernetes at scale, we still can't agree on when centuries start. At least the documentation helpfully redirects all theological disputes to the Vatican's complaint department, which presumably has a longer SLA than your average Jira ticket
Postgres EXTRACT(CENTURY): Mathematically precise, historically orthodox - Vatican complaints not included
EXTRACT(CENTURY) is the only feature with an escalation path above the CTO - if your business insists 2000 is the 21st, file the ticket with Rome
Postgres reminds us that date math isn’t broken - it’s just faithfully implementing a 1582-era API; if you want a zero-based century, open a ticket with the Vatican maintainer
Yes. Millenium celebration in 01.01.2000 all over the globe was amazing stupidity Comment deleted
Given current pope... Please do not write complain to the pope because we'll have the century 0 and everybody will have to patch their date handling as if that wasn't complicated enough. Comment deleted
Not even that, but we'll have to endure through 2024 again Comment deleted
dafuq Comment deleted
True, i misread the post a bit Comment deleted
I'm not catholic, but now I'm curious what kind of pope is Francis now. Is he that modern thinking? Comment deleted
How convenient that calendars are based on religion not science Comment deleted
Same thing really (if you go back far enough) Comment deleted
Always has been💀 Comment deleted
Nerding time: It is not century 21 or year 2024, it is 21st century and 2024th year, so there's technically cannot be 0th century of year Whoever thought that centuries turn at 00th years are wrong. However I dont remember a rule about millenia being turn of 10th century or just appearance of 000th year on calendar Comment deleted
There is worse... ten days were dropped from October 1582 and the day after 4 October 1582 was declared to be 15 October and the pope calculated 13 days missing instead of 10. Which means there are kinda 300 years missing or misdocumented. There is evidence in other religions that our chronications have 300 years missing at some point. Comment deleted
Isn't that issue of leap years? There were multiple adjustments to calendar system because of lack of accuracy in the past Comment deleted
Yes the 10/13 days were Comment deleted
Source https://www.postgresql.org/docs/8.1/functions-datetime.html Comment deleted