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by xahrepap 1172 days ago
Agreed. I think this is where Java’s latest date/time libraries shine (heavily based on Joda time lib).

It makes a solid distinction between Dates, times, instants, and zone dates/times.

And Instant is a moment in time. Exposed as a UTC time stamp.

Birthdays etc are best expressed as LocalDates. There’s also LocalDateTime for zone-agnostic features.

If I were writing software like you describe I’d want an explicitly zone-agnostic date(time) to represent it.
1 comments
drittich 1172 days ago
>If I were writing software like you describe I’d want an explicitly zone-agnostic date(time) to represent it.

I would love to see this as a data type (CalendarDate) baked into languages & databases which would prevent you from applying timezone conversions to it.

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reality_inspctr 1170 days ago
that would be the goal, but it's hard. I went down a long blog-post road about a "clockchain" which includes a way to reconcile zone-less time. tl;dr all time is relative between a minimum of two objects. all but certain there is an elegant way to do it beyond my current thinking.

https://www.seanmcdonald.xyz/p/the-clockchain-protocol-the-l...

cal.com is solving some of these problems with handling of all zones.

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