When you say “don’t store dates as a string” what you’re really saying is “wait for someone else to solve the problem and release a library, then use that library”. That seems to be what the majority of the industry does (I’m a Java coder myself and joda is a lifesaver in that regard) but my point is that this problem is hard. Date and time stamps are a subtly difficult part of the average API monkey’s daily work.
Easy. Don’t store dates as a text string. That’s just bad programming.
When you say “don’t store dates as a string” what you’re really saying is “wait for someone else to solve the problem and release a library, then use that library”. That seems to be what the majority of the industry does (I’m a Java coder myself and joda is a lifesaver in that regard) but my point is that this problem is hard. Date and time stamps are a subtly difficult part of the average API monkey’s daily work.