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Comment by nikitaga | Hacker News Reader

Is this really what a "done" software is? "Should not be used for new projects" is not "done" imo, it's more like "unfixable" and "obsolete". No prejudice at all against Moment.js or its devs, but this is essentially what they're saying.

And the purpose and tone of the article does not seem to be an apology at all, but rather simply setting the expectations for future work so that the maintainers don't have to answer the same questions over and over.

Overall, good to see honest documentation of project status.

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...but there's nothing to "fix", it works as intended. You might want to do things differently nowadays, is all - that's not on Moment.

Re: "obsolete"... jQuery is somewhere laughing, having gone through this already.

> ...but there's nothing to "fix", it works as intended

If there were nothing to fix, they wouldn't be telling people not to start new projects with Moment. They actually do mention a few significant issues that they can't / won't fix in Moment such as bundle size and mutability.

I will concede that perhaps Moment was "done" at some point before, some years back. When it was quite complete, yet was still the best way to do reliably work with timezoned dates in JS. But as Intl support improved, and better designed alternatives grew, it got rather obsolete, and will get more obsolete over time.

jQuery for comparison, while largely obsolete for rich web app development, is still very relevant to ecommerce, website-development-for-hire and other niches, and it will probably stay that way for a long time because it's the right design for those problems. Moment isn't the right design for any problem anymore, unless, as the article says, you need to support old browsers.

I think it's worth making the distinction between "nothing to fix" and "nothing to fix in moment.js". Clearly the problem they're trying to solve is still a real one, and there ARE problems with moment, but the cost of breaking backwards compatibility in moment to fix those problems isn't worth it because the new API would be so dissimilar to the current API it would only confuse users.

I'm not sure "done" and "obsolete" are mutually exclusive. Something can be completed but also not relevant any more. Moment is doing its date thing excellently, it's just not the best solution nowadays.

Mutability isn't an "issue", it's just not the fad of the day. Personally I like mutable objects. The size isn't that bad either.

I'm not going to stop using moment in new or existing projects for petty reasons like the ones presented. I'm tired of having the rug pulled out from under me every time I'm comfortable with something.

Ditto. While the rest of the world messes with all the problems the alternatives have, I'm just gonna drop in moment, solve the problem at hand with a few lines of code and be done with it. Date/time handling in JS is a solved problem and the solution is called moment.js.

> Is this really what a "done" software is?

I think it is. It basically solved all the problems that were there at its inception and the world moved on. It continues to offer a solution for the original problems (which legacy software most likely still has) and can still be used with minimal engineering effort.

I would call that done.

Unfixable is very different from obsolete.

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