@khurtwilliams I had a longer reply but just removed it because it was unecessarily long and might not have come across the way I wanted (which is friendly!). The bottom line for me is that I personally think calendars are all arbitrary anyway, and can be, and have been changed numerous times. If we as a people want to declare a decade like "the twenties" to be all the years that have a 2 in the tens place then that's fine. If that means someone wants to go back and declare that the first decade of the calendar is only 9 years long... well that's ok too. It's all arbitrary and made up by us anyway, so why not? Anyway, just my two cents. Happy New Year!
@khurtwilliams Correct or not, I'm afraid the argument has been lost. Maybe I'm wrong and the "New Decade" party next December will turn out to be a Rager, but I'm not counting on it.
Also, I think my programmer friends would say that to assume counting starts at 1 is to guarantee you've just introduced a bug. :)
Also, I think my programmer friends would say that to assume counting starts at 1 is to guarantee you've just introduced a bug. :)
When it comes to reckoning years, counting does start at 1. Otherwise, children would celebrate their first birthdays after two years of life (and their 0th after 1 year). As @khurtwilliams points out above, the Gregorian calendar doesn’t include a Year Zero, and it would be quite odd if it did. Programming languages typically start with 0 because the decimal system would have to treat “10” as a single digit but for most purposes most of us start counting at 1, not at 0. It doesn’t make a lot of practical difference if people choose to celebrate a new decade, century or millennium a year early but ideally they should know they’re doing so.
@DrOct But I think that's a different thing. A decade is any 10 years. I could say my wife and I have been married over two decades and it wouldn't matter when I started counting. But calendar decades start the count at year 1. We are in the 10th year of the 202nd decade of the Gregorian calendar.
@jack I plan on having a raging good time bringing in the next decade at the end of this year.