On 2010-05-30, at 12:39 , Marcos Bonci wrote:
From Masklinn's post in his blog:
It's very nice of you to attribute such a great post to me, but I just linked to it. I'm not the author of any of the resources I linked to.
I like Python because I can usually rely on its "magic" and just care about what's elegant and readable (or else I would be using C). Judging from your personal experience, the magic looks more like illusionism when it comes to dates. Maybe this matter deserves closer attention in the context of the language/stdlibs than it has received so far? After all it's time we're talking about, it's not like it's something unimportant or rarely used (and it's something I would definitely expect to be able to rely on Python for, since pretty much everything else Python is just awesome).
One of the issues from what I understand is that you pretty much need to be a specialist in the time/date domain (or have one available at all times) to get this stuff right. I'm guessing the Python community doesn't have any involved/available, least of which at the core level. Furthermore if you want to see what's usually considered a best-of-breed in the java world, look not at the standard library but at joda time [1]. In fact, with Java 7 the current Date/Calendar API should be replaced by one strongly inspired by Joda (and created by its author) and influenced by a few other APIs of the Java world. See JSR 310 for details [2], though note that the inclusion in Java 7 apparently isn't certain yet due to delays in the JSR 310 process [3]. For a (probably long outdated) overview of what JSR 310 would provide, see [4] [1] http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/ [2] http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=310 [3] http://tech.puredanger.com/java7 [4] http://today.java.net/pub/a/today/2008/09/18/jsr-310-new-java-date-time-api....