It's Time for a Change: Datetime.utcnow() Is Now Deprecated

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • Pendulum

    Python datetimes made easy

  • Python could be better but really, does any language handle date and time types well? After 30+ years of this I mostly just use seconds since epoch everywhere like some sort of caveman banging rocks together. But at least it works clearly.

    Last I looked Pendulum was the best choice for a fancy but humane Python library for dates and times. Install size is over 4MB :-( https://pendulum.eustace.io/

  • mypy

    Optional static typing for Python

  • It's funny you should say this.

    Reading this article prompted me to future-proof a program I maintain for fun that deals with time; it had one use of utcnow, which I fixed.

    And then I tripped over a runtime type problem in an unrelated area of the code, despite the code being green under "mypy --strict". (and "100% coverage" from tests, except this particular exception only occured in a "# pragma: no-cover" codepath so it wasn't actually covered)

    It turns out that because of some core decisions about how datetime objects work, `datetime.date.today() < datetime.datetime.now()` type-checks but gives a TypeError at runtime. Oops. (cause discussed at length in https://github.com/python/mypy/issues/9015 but without action for 3 years)

    One solution is apparently to use `datetype` for type annotations (while continuing to use `datetime` objects at runtime): https://github.com/glyph/DateType

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  • DateType

    A type wrapper for the standard library `datetime` that supplies stricter checks, such as making 'datetime' not substitutable for 'date', and separating out Naive and Aware datetimes into separate, mutually-incompatible types.

  • It's funny you should say this.

    Reading this article prompted me to future-proof a program I maintain for fun that deals with time; it had one use of utcnow, which I fixed.

    And then I tripped over a runtime type problem in an unrelated area of the code, despite the code being green under "mypy --strict". (and "100% coverage" from tests, except this particular exception only occured in a "# pragma: no-cover" codepath so it wasn't actually covered)

    It turns out that because of some core decisions about how datetime objects work, `datetime.date.today() < datetime.datetime.now()` type-checks but gives a TypeError at runtime. Oops. (cause discussed at length in https://github.com/python/mypy/issues/9015 but without action for 3 years)

    One solution is apparently to use `datetype` for type annotations (while continuing to use `datetime` objects at runtime): https://github.com/glyph/DateType

  • concise-encoding

    The secure data format for a modern world

  • "Local time" is time zone metadata. I've written a fair bit about timekeeping, because the context of what you're capturing becomes very important: https://github.com/kstenerud/concise-encoding/blob/master/ce...

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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