Those articles are more empirical in nature than theoretical.
> This logs that an image with a given id was updated
As a thought exercise, imagine that your log trail needed to be created in a distributed system, spanning multiple machine time zones, or that you needed to build a report that is read from browsers in multiple time zones that differ from multiple differing written time zones, and you need to account for human readable things like knowing what day of the week it is and what some given locale calls that day.
If you are doing the equivalent of printf debugging with your times, maybe you likely don’t need a time library.
If you are using time as a central part of a distributed algorithm, web content, or a business workflow, then you may likely need a time library.
You are trying to convince me with the popular "This is not going to work for a much more complex system".
I heard it very often. I don't buy it. Any system, no matter how complex, can be composed of small, simple systems.
I never ran against a "complexity wall" when writing software in a lean way and suddenly thought "Damn, those tens of thousands of lines of library code now would be the better approach".
That’s very true. A colleague recently started using the same method and is achieving bundles and dependencies orders of magnitude smaller. As a result, he has to care less about security, build times and build breaks and spends more time coding. Developers have unlearned to build basic functionality apparently, especially in the front end area.
Those articles are more empirical in nature than theoretical.
> This logs that an image with a given id was updated
As a thought exercise, imagine that your log trail needed to be created in a distributed system, spanning multiple machine time zones, or that you needed to build a report that is read from browsers in multiple time zones that differ from multiple differing written time zones, and you need to account for human readable things like knowing what day of the week it is and what some given locale calls that day.
If you are doing the equivalent of printf debugging with your times, maybe you likely don’t need a time library.
If you are using time as a central part of a distributed algorithm, web content, or a business workflow, then you may likely need a time library.