I'm old enough to remember computers being pitched as devices that can do tedious math for us. Now we have to do tedious math for them apparently.

The one true unit of time is hexadecimal encoded nanoseconds since the unix epoch. (I'm only half joking because I actually have authored code that used that before.)

Seconds are also unambiguous. Depending on your chosen definition, "X days" may or may not be influenced by leap seconds and DST changes.

I doubt anyone cares about an hour more or less in this context. But if you want multiple implementations to agree talking about seconds on a monotonic timer is a lot simpler

> seconds are the SI base unit for time

True. But seconds are not the base unit for package compromises coming to light. The appropriate unit for that is almost certainly days.

that kind of complexity is always worth it. Every single time. It's user time that you're saving and it also makes config clearer for readers and cuts out on "too many/little zeroes on accident" errors

It's just library for handling time that 98% of the time your app will be using for something else.

But you know that Java solution will continue working even after we no longer use the Gregorian Calendar, the collapse and annexation of Malaysia to some foreign power, and then us finally switching to a 4-day work week; so it'd be worth it.

In before someone thinks it's a joke, the most commonly used logging library in Java had LDAP support in format scripts enabled by default" (which resulted, of course in CVE)

There's an extra digit in your timestamp.

JavaScript Temporal. Not sure knowing what a "workday" is in each timezone is in it's scope but it's the much needed and improved JS, date API (granted with limited support to date)

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

…now imagine a list of instruments, some of which have durations specified in days/weeks/months (problems already with the latter) and some in workdays, and the user just told your app to display it sorted by duration.

Me too, it was just a constant filled with bank holidays for the next 6 years

I tried to write this function in Power Query (Excel hell). Gave up after an hour or so.

And we need groups of locales for teams that are split across multiple locations; e.g.:

  new_date = add_workdays(
    workdays=1.5,
    start=datetime.now(),
    regions=["es", "mx", "nl", "us"],
  )

Don't forget about regional holidays, which might follow arbitrary borders that don't match any of the official subdivisions of the country. Or may even depend on the chosen faith of the worker

Making a whole movie just to retcon the parsec misuse in Ep IV was a choice

That had more or less been the explanation in the books for decades, and even in George Lucas' notes from 1977:

> It's a very simple ship, very economical ship, although the modifications he made to it are rather extensive – mostly to the navigation system to get through hyperspace in the shortest possible distance (parsecs).