Comment by wpollock

>Again, it is hard to overstate just _how_ bad the previous version [of Java time] is.

The original Java Time classes were likely a last-minute addition to Java. They were obviously a direct copy of C language time.h. It feels as if the Java team had a conversation like this: "Darn, we ship Java 1.0 in a month but we forgot to include any time functions!" "Oh no! We must do something!" "I know, let's just port C time.h!"