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Comment by Walkman | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why this library exists. I am (literally) manipulating datetimes for a living in a Django app this whole year and we don't even have Arrow installed. Pytz and maybe dateutil is all you need.

Also I really hate when someone fragment the energy and their time making a new, inferior library instead of fixing and patching the existings for basic things like this. This way we will have a bunch of incomplete, inferior libraries which all have quirks instead of only one really good one which could everybody use...

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I don't see what the big deal is. These people are spending their own time making libraries, and not using up your time. Are you to judge how people should make use of their time?

Second, I think it's great that people are making alternatives - it promotes a healthier ecosystem where people can share good ideas as well.

> instead of fixing and patching the existings Finally, by your logic, the popular requests library shouldn't have existed and Kenneth would have been patching the more conventional urllib library

> Are you to judge how people should make use of their time?

This library did not born because of fun, but because of solving a (non-existing) problem from frustration. I would have not said one word if he was doing this for fun or just learning or something like that.

What defines a problem as non-existing/existing? It's very subjective. While it may not be for you, the author definitely saw an issue that needed to be fixed.

Again, I'm using the example of requests: was Kennethwrong to implement something new when there was already a standard lib?

Django provides django.utils.timezone to make handling dates and times easier. Not every python project has access to django.utils.timezone. pytz is mostly what you need to get timezones right, but there's still room for something like this.

good point, but still, there are at least 3-4 libraries which do exactly what this library is trying to do and do a better job at it

What libraries? I'm honestly interested to know which ones you refer to.

https://dateutil.readthedocs.io

http://crsmithdev.com/arrow/

http://pythonhosted.org/pytz/

http://delorean.readthedocs.io

http://github.hubspot.com/sanetime/

https://github.com/zachwill/moment

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.10/topics/i18n/timezones...

The most similar to this are Arrow and Delorean, maybe Django timezone if you use Django.

So, basically, you haven't read any of my comments. Arrow is really flawed see https://pendulum.eustace.io/faq/#why-not-arrow and Delorean is not as complete feature-wise as Pendulum. Both of these libraries do not handle properly shifting time around DST transition times which is a big flaw in itself beacause it's not accurate.

Also manipulating datetimes for a living (telemetry + billing). The reason I stick with Arrow despite its slowing maintainership? Its ability to round up or down time along a granularity: http://crsmithdev.com/arrow/#arrow.arrow.Arrow.floor

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