Well, Khen gets pissed off at the drop of a hat, I think we've all witnessed this behavior by now, so what you gonna do. It must be exhausting.
Anyway, if I had to guess I'd say that in there system they have a date which is generated by windows but for some reason in another part of the system it is only accessible as a string so they have to parse it, and they need therefore to know the format it's in do so reliably (I have no idea if they're able to interrogate the system and simply find out what the setting is). Why this should be, who the fuck knows. It could have been an error in the distant past that is too costly to fix, it could be a limitation of some API, library or language they're using, a limitation of the storage format they use, or a consequence of some bizarre inhouse coding standard they're stuck with, or any one of of another a million other things.
Point is; you don't just look at something that appears stupid and then go "obviously the person who wrote this was an idiot, I am so much smarter and so I shall fix it!" Because there's a good chance that five hours later you discover there was a very good reason for that thing that only becomes apparent after looking into the problem for five hours. Or worse, you discover that what seemed stupid was actually a fix for an incredibly obscure bug that you just reintroduced without even knowing about it, but which will quickly become apparent as soon as the software is being used by thousands of people.
This, of course, is also why quirks like this date thing stay in software for version after version, the cost of fixing it and then verifying the fix doesn't have some bizarre unintended consequences may simply outweigh the perceived inconvenience to the user.
Of course here I'm talking about someone who actually has access to the code in question; to make that kind of judgement - "anyone who does this should not be let near code because because apparently I'm physic and can tell exactly what code was written and why" - when all you have to go on is text description of the issue is goes beyond hubris into the realms of the insane.
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Originally Posted by Steely Glint
