OK, I give up. You can revoke my nerd card if you wish. What’s the joke?
31 in base eight (OCTal) = 25 in base ten (DECimal). 
The reasons have already been mentioned. Christmas is not the same day for everyone. It’s more work to account for a mix of fixed and computed dates. There are only rarely good reasons for hard-coding anything at the source code level. Even when hard-coded, something like a date should be defined as a named constant or macro.
The laziness of people who make a living sitting on their ass never ceases to amaze me.
:smack: I actually figured this out while driving home from work today. My first instinct was that it had to do with number bases, but I didn’t immediately get it because I hadn’t seen them expressed with that notation before. But it’s obvious/intuitive enough when you think about it.
You’re lazy like I am lazy… anybody who’s been with me for a while knows that when I use “oh, I’m lazy” during a conversation about design, what follows is “I’d rather work a little more now and a lot less later”.
The correct term is “efficient”, but if I called myself that, people would be able to accuse me of “putting on airs”… by saying “I’m lazy”, I can call my coworkers lazy inefficient bums in total impunity 
My current client is a multinational group, more than 100 companies. By using hardcoded forms instead of a single design with options, we’ve so far managed to have more than 20 forms just for Billing, and just in a single country - that’s 20 and counting. Plus the forms used in other countries, I don’t even know what the current total is. Just one more line to my list of “stories which show how hardcoding ends up causing extra work”.
I did a course in Business Analysis many years ago and and the lecturer cautioned against doing things “like this.” He then showed a piece of code where a working storage variable had been assigned as pi = 3.14159265 with a comment by the programmer that he had defined it here for “ease of updating if in future the value of pi changes.”
The lecturer thought the joke was terrible but I quite liked it, not least because I was the only one that laughed when he displayed the code.
So, Sunspace, have you read “The Family Man” in Casebook of the Black Widowers by Asimov?
History lesson from the Java 1.0->1.1->1.2 transition. You never know when the calendar API you’re using is going to replace something simple and broken with something complicated and broken.
I think you meant … something complicated and broken differently.
He may have meant what he wrote. Certainly the average upgrade must live up to the expectation of introducing new problems, but the true measure of a useless upgrade is it’s failure to correct a previous problem while doing so. The very best systems will support legacy modes that allow it to not work at multiple levels.