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Comment by xeckr | Hacker News Reader

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xeckr·

I suspect that the arrival of ChatGPT caused traffic to the MDN Date API documentation to go down by at least half.

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To be fair it's exactly the type of stuff I'd be glad if I never have to think about again.

Go down by half of user traffic, go up 10x of crawler traffic.

Built a scheduler with pretty much all my moment/moment-tz questions answered through ChatGPT. One of the things it excels at, crawling long lived API documentation, answers, etc.

The Date API is fine and relatively normalized. Once you understand it it's very easy to work with. It's biggest problem is that it simply does not support timezones, which is the main reason to use Temporal.

yep. i had a hell of a time building a scheduling system for a business that worked across timezones with the date API

The Date API is horrible

Yea, that's understood to be the opinion, blandly repeating it adds little to the discussion.

It's simple. In it's simplicity it left many features on the floor. I just can't connect with the idea that someone would need to constantly be on MDN in order to work with it. It's not so horrible that it defies logic.

It’s not simple, though. Simple would be something like an object wrapping YYYY-MM-DD, like a COBOL programmer in the 1950s would’ve used. Instead, people have made thousands of variations of bugs around the complexity even basic usage forces you to internalize like the month number being zero-based while the year is 1900-based but the day of the month is 1-based following standard usage.

It's not simple, it has hidden pitfalls and footguns. Using it is the fastest way to blood on the floor (to quote a senior developer I worked with).

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