[skywhopper]

By my count it's over 30 characters less "clean". The Java syntax obscures some meaning and requires a lot more boilerplate in favor of less magical (and thus complex) syntax.

I agree that this sort of first-class datetime-type representation may not be appropriate for every language, but myself, I find it refreshing and brilliant, and I'd love to see more languages support this sort of syntax instead of overloading strings or using complicated objects or APIs.

It's like comparing the power and ease of using regular expressions in Perl or Ruby versus in Java or Python. In Perl and Ruby, regexes are built-in to the syntax of the language itself. They're a truly first-class type, like strings and integers are in all four languages, and like lists and dicts/hashes/associative arrays are in Perl, Ruby, and Python.

I'd love to see datetime objects promoted to similar first-class native syntax support in this way in more languages. It won't be appropriate everywhere, but in the right language it'd be amazing.

[ehartsuyker]

The Java is clean because it's perfectly understandable. I don't have to think about "+ 1m" meaning month, minute, or milli-. Verbose, yes, but the meaning is 100% unambiguous which I think makes it a better API.

> overloading strings

I'm pretty sure writing "+ 1m" is more of an overloading of a string than ".plusMinutes(1)".

[stanmancan]

How is plusMonths(1).plusDays(1) obscure in any way? You could show that to my grandparents and they would be able to guess what it does. "+1m1d" on the other hand they wouldn't have a clue.

Length, in either direction, does not correlate to "clean". Clarity and intent does. Clean Coder (http://www.amazon.ca/Clean-Code-Handbook-Software-Craftsmans...) does a fantastic job talking about this, it's worth picking up if you haven't read it in the past.

[nickpsecurity]

"Length, in either direction, does not correlate to "clean". Clarity and intent does."

Exactly. So, the first example starts with a date in a way of representing dates that will register immediately for even a lay person. The developer intends to add time to that date. The example does this with an addition operator then a value with letters representing recognizable units of time. Matter of fact, this was so obvious that I knew what the author was doing before I read the explanation. I'd probably do "min," "sec," "hr," etc to aid intuition, though. Esp avoid confusion on months vs minutes for m.

Then, there's the other example. It appears to create an object. It then calls a method on that clearly adds one month. It also calls a method of that method, that object... idk that language so I don't really know the semantics of what it's doing... to add 1 day.

One is definitely more clear and intuitive than the other. It also has the rare property of being easier to type. Epic win over whatever the other thing is. Not to say the other one was bad: still pretty clear. Just not as much as a straight-forward expression.

[ehartsuyker]

In the former, typing '2012.01.01' implicitly creates a date object (probably), and '1m1d' implicitly creates some sort of duration object (probably) and uses an operator to combine them.

The Java was isn't really that different. Just more verbose, but again, I don't mind trading a few key strokes for clarity.

[nickpsecurity]

What clarity? That's what I mean. The first example starts with a date then adds values to it. Second does same thing. I use neither language nor do tjme series but still knew tge intent. So all you're getting is extra keystrokes with same clarity.

[xixi77]

Length itself does not; but there is an obvious benefit to a syntax that is both short and clear -- when reviewing the code, it takes much less time to figure out what's happening.

Take matrix algebra for example: what takes less time to process (e.g. when debugging code) --

`a = b'*c+d` or

`a = matrixAdd(matrixMult(matrixTranspose(b),c),d)`

or perhaps

`a = b.inverse().times(c).add(d)`? What if there are hundreds of operations like that?

Now, there _might_ be people for whom syntax (3) is the clearest -- for example, these could be people who know some programming, but are not familiar with matrix data or operations. However, their convenience, or that of your grandparents, doesn't really matter: if it's a one-off job for them, figuring it out would take a very small fraction of their time and is not worth optimizing for, and if it's not, extra time to learn the syntax would more than pay for itself when they have to regularly work with it. We don't use words to describe such expressions in print for exactly the same reason! :)

[JadeNB]

> By my count it's over 30 characters less "clean".

If character count were really the ultimate measure of cleanliness, then we'd all be programming pointlessly (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacit_programming) and using single-character names for any variables that slipped through. (That's not to say that shorter is never better, but rather that, when it is better, its brevity is not the only reason.)

[crispyambulance]

The java "syntax" doesn't matter.

The IDE provides context-sensitive cues as one types so that you don't have the cognitive paper-cut from having to think for even a second if "1m" means "one minute" or "one month".

At a deeper level, chaining method calls to build-up an object is perfectly understandable way to modify something like a date.