(#nik3c4a) @movq@www.uninformativ.de @abucci@anthony.buc.ci Yes, formatting with a special date is incredibly silly. I couldn’t believe it myself either the first time I ran across it. It still drives me nuts every single fucking time I have to deal with it. Not sure why the Go folks still don’t consider it a failed experiment. Luckily, I can often just use the time.RFC3339 or time.RFC3339Nano constants and don’t worry about it.

Maybe the positive effect is that you’re forced to always go to the docs to look everything up when writing the special time pattern, because there’s no chance of remembering anything at all (maybe except the year 2006). With the letter system you might think you know what you do and then skip that check in the docs and finally fail because it was the other way around again. If the Go maintainers wanted to prevent that, then they actually succeeded.

It really depends on the ecosystem you’re in. The lower date and upper time rule e.g. doesn’t work for Java: yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssSSSXXX (not sure on the exact number of Xs though).


#gdsz7fa