January 13, 2023
Since I made the Other Calendars page, especially the side remark about purely-lunar calendars, I've had the idea floating in my head to make a coding toy to implement one. Either pure lunar like the Islamic calendar, or an intercalated lunar one like the Hebrew calendar. We just had a new moon near the end of last year, that would be a good place to start and work backwards.
I could even pick an important date to start from instead of some Middle Eastern rando's birthday, which is probably off by a few years anyway. Maybe use Latin or Old English names for the months just for grins. I'd definitely have the days start at midnight though. Ignoring the fact that sunset (or sunrise) changes depending on location and where the moon is in the sky when the new moon actually happens, trying to figure the time offset between midnight and whatever point I pick would just be an extra pain in my ass.
For a pure lunar calendar I wouldn't need to worry about leap years. There'd be a need to occasionally get away from alternating between 29- and 30-day months to stay aligned with the lunar cycle but since we're already ignoring the tropical year, who cares about leap years?
The intercalated calendar would need leap years though, since the point of adding an extra month ("Smarch"?) from time to time is to stay roughly in line with the tropical year. And keeping that alignment means knowing about leap years. Or at least knowing the tropical year's length is 365.24217 days.
And there's the matter of picking a starting point. I'm not even sure what it would be, though I'd prefer it go back a ways. Having a Year Zero seemed to cause most of the problems with my Martian calendar so maybe this time around and do like with BCE/CE and go straight from -1 to 1 skipping zero. Or maybe that would make it worse. Who knows.
So there's my idea(s). Sounds like just enough of a pain that I'm not likely to do either of them, but who knows. Maybe I'll feel inspired.
Edit, later that evening: Haha, I'm an idiot. I'm building it out now.
