This is more evident in games/simulations but the same problem arises more or less in any software: batch jobs and DAGs, distributed systems and transactions, etc.
This what Rich Hickey (Clojure author) has termed “place oriented programming”, when the focus is mutating memory addresses and having to synchronize everything, but failing to model time as a first class concept.
I’m not aware of any general purpose programming language that successfully models time explicitly, Verilog might be the closest to that.
> I’m not aware of any general purpose programming language that successfully models time explicitly
Step 1, solve "time" for general computing.
The difficulty here is that our periods are local out of both necessity and desire; we don't fail to model time as a first class concept, we bring time-as-first-class with us and then attempt to merge our perspectives with varying degrees of success.
We're trying to rectify the observations of Zeno, a professional turtle hunter, and a track coach with a stopwatch when each one has their own functional definition of time driven by intent.