On Sat, Feb 02, 2019 at 11:56:47PM -0500, James Lu wrote: > > I accept that datetime.datetime reads a bit funny and is a bit annoying. > > If we had the keys to the time machine and could go back a decade to > > version 3.0, or even further back to 1.5 or whenever the datetime module > > was first created, it would be nice to change it so that the class was > > DateTime. But changing it *now* is not free, it has real, serious costs > > which are probably greater than the benefit gained.
> Why can’t we put “now” as a property of the module itself, reccomend > that, and formally deprecate but never actually remove > datetime.datetime.now? The first half of that suggestion has merit. I would definitely appreciate a pair of top-level helper functions that returned the current date and current datetime. They might even be as simple as this: # In the datetime module today = date.today now = datetime.now But there is no reason to deprecate the existing functionality. It isn't broken or harmful. There's no need to remove it. Being able to construct a new date or datetime object using a method of the class is a perfectly natural thing to do. And deprecating a feature that you have no intention of removing just adds noise to the language. [...] > > Actually, no, on average, the projected lifespan of technologies, > > companies and cultural memes is about the same as their current age. It > > might last less, or it might last more, but the statistical expectation > > is about the same as the current age. So on average, "the future" is > > about the same as "the past". > > > > Python has been around not quite 30 years now, so we can expect that it > > will probably last another 30 years. But chances are not good that it > > will be around in 300 years. > > A big reason why projects last as long as you say they last is that > the maintainers get un-ambitious, they get used to relaxing in the > language they know so well, they are no longer keen on change. Possibly the most widely-used language in the world, C, is also far more conservative and slow-changing than Python. (Python is about in the middle as far as speed of change.) We put out new features roughly every 18 months. C brings them out about once a decade. Whether we love or hate C, it is pretty clear that it is not going away any time soon. -- Steven _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
