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PaperclipPerfector  8d ago (text post)   30204 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 9, 2024

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Just about every serious programming language includes zoneinfo related functions in the standard library.

The serious programmers that use zoneinfo are lacking. Not the library funcitons.

Agreed.

Yes I agree, e.g. in Python I use pd.DatetimeIndex.tz_localize to help me with this (after spending my first two years as a quant doing things manually before throwing my hands up and realizing that this is a common problem everyone must be having, so someone somewhere has probably created a good solution).

However needing to import it and write like an extra 10 lines of code for every single project I wouldn't need to do if DST (shakes fist) didn't exist adds up over time to become a serious pain in the ass. Plus now my script has an extra dependency and is more susceptible to code bitrot over time as it'll stop working if pd.DatetimeIndex gets its behaviour changed or deprecated.

Also SQL doesn't play nicely with timezones at all, so the problem still very much exists for SQL scripts unless you only want to use SQL to pull the data and will do all your analysis with the pulled data in a different language.

Yes I agree, e.g. in Python I use pd.DatetimeIndex.tz_localize

Well, that's your mistake - I'm talking about the standard library, not pandas. No dependency, no bitrot. No need to localize any datetimes until you're displaying them, so as long as you aren't working with naive datetimes it's pretty low overhead.

Also SQL doesn't play nicely with timezones at all, so the problem still very much exists for SQL scripts unless you only want to use SQL to pull the data and will do all your analysis with the pulled data in a different language.

As SQL is fundamentally not a serious language, it indeed does not support zoneinfo.

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