[Animats]

This area is prone to severe bikeshedding. Back in 2012, I filed a Python bug, "datetime: add ability to parse RFC 3339 dates and times"[1] RFC 3339 timestamps appear in email, RSS feeds, etc. The datetime library could output them, but not parse them. There are at least seven parsing functions in PyPi for them, and each has some major problem.

There have been steady discussions of this issue for almost four years now. I dropped out years ago, but the arguments go on.

[1] https://bugs.python.org/issue15873

[jgalt212]

> RFC 3339 timestamps appear in email

Where exactly in email to do they appear? In the header, it's been my experience they all conform to the RFC 2822 spec, and could be parsed with the standard library function email.utils.parsedate_tz[1].

[1] https://docs.python.org/2/library/email.util.html#email.util...

[fragmede]

Past bikeshedding, there's also the long list of myths programmers believe about time[1] and the crowd-sourced followup[2]. Pendulum inherits from datetime in the stdlib, but I'm unsure how well either of those address the issues raised (or even if it's possible - some need to be addressed by the code that uses pendulum/datetime).

[1] http://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programm... [2] http://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-pro...

[Animats]

Nobody has a good solution to leap seconds. 86400 seconds = 1 day is nailed into too much software. The problem is serious enough that some operations, including high frequency trading, are stopped around a leap second.