quarantine 'em

Easter may be humanity's chronologically earliest coding horror

The more I research the Easter calculations, the more I get the sense not of necessary complexity but of deliberate obfuscation

Easter calculations boil down to converting Gregorian calendar dates to a liturgical lunar calendar which appears to have no formal name (?)

Getting concrete information about this lunar calendar is surprisingly troublesome, and all the explanations I can find are very bad

For example, documentation seemingly goes to inordinate lengths to conceal the fact that this lunar calendar ignores leap days

Much is made of the lunar calendar's fine attempt to approximate 365.2425-day Gregorian years. It doesn't do this! It uses 365-day years

Just subtracting all the leap days out of the Gregorian calendar makes converting to the lunar calendar unimaginably simpler

Then there are epacts. Epacts require big, horrible, impermanent tables both to compute and to interpret. They are also absolutely unneeded