I guess before that there was just a formless void with no time, no past and no future. Ok, maybe not, but no DateTime.pm for sure.
I realized that the 5 year anniversary of the Perl DateTime Project passed by recently. I date it this post to the datetime@perl.org list I made on January 9, 2003. That really got the ball rolling, and I was actually working on the first version of DateTime.pm in the next day or two.
Thanks to everyone who's contributed over the years. I don't think we realized that we'd end up creating _the_ definitive set of Perl date/time libraries, to the point where a _lot_ of people say "oh, I just use DateTime for everything".
Even better, I think we still have one of the best date/time library suites of _any_ language out there. The only thing I've seen in all this time that comes close is the Chronos library for Smalltalk, myself. Of course, if someone wants to point me at one they think rocks, I'm happy to learn more.
Re:Date/Time for Java
lachoy on 2008-01-16T02:43:16
As a heavy user of Joda I echo what you've heard -- it's excellent. It's well-coded and well-designed, and threadsafe throughout. Particularly compared to what's in the JDK, blech.
Re:Now for Email.
sigzero on 2008-01-16T12:31:22
You mean:
http://emailproject.perl.org/Re:Now for Email.
kaare on 2008-01-16T13:04:48
Didn't it die a year ago?Re:Now for Email.
sigzero on 2008-01-16T15:14:59
Not that I am aware of. One of the devs still posts not to use MIME::Lite (and he is the maintainer of it) as the Email modules are better.Re:Now for Email.
autarch on 2008-01-16T15:58:43
It's not dead, but it never saw the same kind of mass enthusiasm and initial flood of work that the DateTime project did. However, I do use the Email::* modules all the time for sending emails, and they work great. I get the impression that if you wanted to do something like write a mail client, you'd have your work cut out for you.
As sigzero mentioned, it's still active, and Ric Signes (RJBS on CPAN) is still working on the project. I'm sure he'd appreciate some help.
