On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 12:13 PM, anatoly techtonik <techtonik@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Here is something that can be used as an example that it is not about PEP8 https://code.google.com/p/rainforce/wiki/WartsOfPython#measure_time And it takes a lot of energy to collect something like that for the reference.

Well, in that document, I see the total of four "warts" related to the datetime module. If four warts bring a module to the top of the "worst designed stdlib modules" list, it can only mean that stdlib is almost perfect!

For each "wart" the author has a "What can be done?" section, but no suggested solution involves a major redesign of the datetime module.

The author complains about non-obviousness of strftime and indeed, for users without C background, neither name nor semantics is familiar. But the proposed solution

>>> time.format('{{hours}}:{{minutes}}:{{seconds}}', 1090)
'00:18:10'

Does not look like a big win over the already available solution:

>>> '{t.hour}:{t.minute}:{t.second}'.format(t=datetime.now())

'12:37:38'

Overall, while I agree that there are a few warts in the datetime module, I have not seen any serious enough to warrant a major redesign or even any non backward compatible changes. Maintaining backward compatibility in the datetime module is indeed non-trivial, but this is the way I think it should be developed.