Comment by p2detar
21 hours ago
They might very well be, because time-handling in Java almost always sucked. In the beginning there was java.util.Date and it was very poorly designed. Sun tried to fix that with java.util.Calendar. That worked for a while but it was still cumbersome, Calendar.getInstance() anyone? After that someone sat down and wrote Joda-Time, which was really really cool and IMO the basis of JSR-310 and the new java.time API. So you're kind of right, but it only took them 15 years to make it right.
At the time of Date's "reign", were there any other language with a better library? And Calendar is not a replacement for Date so it's a bit out of the picture.
Joda time is an excellent library and indeed it was basically the basis for java's time API, and.. for pretty much any modern language's time API, but given the history - Java basically always had the best time library available at the time.
I’m sorry but I do not agree at all.
That “reign” continued forever if you count when java.time got introduced and no, Calendar was not much better in the mean time. Python already had datetime in 2002 or 2003 and VB6 was miles ahead back when Java had just util.Date.