Piter Py #4 / Serge Matveenko: "Could you tell me what time it is?" / Saint Petersburg, Russia / 3 November 2017

Could you tell me what time it is?

People began to calculate the time long before the advent of computers and managed to work out a lot of cunning rules for selecting reference points and recording time and dates. And Unix time is just one more of these ways, despite it is extremely convenient for the "machine", which is also necessary to relate to other ways somehow.
I'll talk about how we store time in Python, how we work with it, what problems the developer faces when dealing with time and dates, time zones, different views of the time, and etc. I'll show you how to work with tools that can greatly facilitate life and help a machine understand a person.
We will analyze standard Python tools and their evolution in different versions, the most necessary libraries for working with time and dates, compare the capabilities of three libraries, which with varying degrees of success help to transform (parse) dates and time from human-comprehensible writing into a machine-understandable representation.