Temporal: The 9-Year Journey to Fix Time in JavaScript

Re:Temporal: The 9-Year Journey to Fix Time in JavaScript by sheept on Wednesday March 11, 2026 @05:05PM (#47341838)

I think that it's nice it's explicit that the method returns the current instant, rather than some other zero value.

There's also other methods that return other types, like

    const now = Temporal.Now.instant()

which isn't as bad.

One could argue that the ugliness of the API intentionally reveals the ugliness of datetime. It forces you to really think about what you mean when you want "the current date time," which I think is one of the goals of the API.

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Re:Temporal: The 9-Year Journey to Fix Time in JavaScript by Bratmon on Wednesday March 11, 2026 @05:55PM (#47342630)

What would have been wrong with Temporal.now() returning a sensible value?

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Re:Temporal: The 9-Year Journey to Fix Time in JavaScript by ejplatzer on Wednesday March 11, 2026 @09:03PM (#47344908)

What counts as a sensible value? The whole point of the library is to be explicitly about what kind of date/time data you're working with, because different kinds of data have to be handled in very different ways.

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Re:Temporal: The 9-Year Journey to Fix Time in JavaScript by Bratmon on Thursday March 12, 2026 @01:30PM (#47354353)

If they at least had a Temporal.nowlocal() and a Temporal.nowUTC() that returned a ZonedDateTime set to the local and UTC timezones respectively, that would be 95% of what developers need in practice.

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