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Comment by jb1991 | Hacker News Reader

jb1991

This is the most extraordinary thing that I have personally seen in my career as a software developer, and I have worked in many different fields and different languages and on different platforms, but this is by a very wide margin the most exciting.

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Why is it extraordinary? moment.js has been excellent for me, same for PHP's builtin DateTimeImmutable. What does this do that makes it extraordinary?

It standardizes it across platforms and implementations; I mean you mention Moment.js, but it's been superseded by Luxon and DayJS ages ago; Moment is very large in terms of file size and doesn't support tree shaking, it creates mutable objects, same as Date, etc etc etc.

But there's the problem. Use momentjs today and you're behind the times, but use the new standard library date functions and you're pretty much guaranteed that code that works today will still work in 20 years.

> but use the new standard library date functions and you're pretty much guaranteed that code that works today will still work in 20 years

JS doesn't really have breaking changes. Until they do, MomentJS will always work.

> It standardizes it across platforms and implementations

Does it? I mean it prints the date and is a standard library, but I don't think it standardizes anything. Web doesn't really benefit from everyone using the same date library. It's all strings once it's sent over the wire.

One reason Temporal is a huge deal is because it differentiates between Date, Time, and DateTime. All of the libraries building on top of jsDate couldn't really do this effectively. I've been using Temporal in production now for about 2 years with a polyfill and while this distinction can be annoying at first, the ability to be so much more specific is very helpful.

It is great news. I was not aware this was in the works.

Using other libraries for something as fundamental as this always seemed odd.

I detect the slightest bit of sarcasm but then again it’s hard to read tone in random internet comments.

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