Long, long ago, I wrote Date::Discordian. It was my first foray into date/time code, and I did it because I have always been fascinated by non-Gregorian calendars, and the math behind them. Discordian was the obvious place to start because it is one of the very few calendars that is completely predictable. Every year starts and ends on the same day of the week. Every month starts and ends on the same day of the week every year. Oh, and it also had a touch of the absurd to it.

Date::Discordian was based on Date::ICal, which was, at the time, one of the standard “you should use this” Perl date/time modules. There were some incredibly talented people working on Date/Time stuff at the time, one of whom was Dave Rolsky. It became increasingly evident that the state of Date/Time stuff in Perl required a major project to consolidate all the various things that had been done, make them reliable, make them usable, and make them mathematically rigorous. Dave and I started the Perl Datetime Project.

I promptly moved into a series of jobs that didn’t involve Perl in any way, and drifted away from the project.

Today I was poking around old svn repos and came across the module, and started looking around. Turns out that there’s a new Discordian module, DateTime::Calendar::Discordian, which uses the DateTime stack. It does a lot more than my module does, but it has fewer witty remarks in the comments. I suppose if you’re using the Discordian calendar for something serious, you need the new one, but if you’re using the Discordian calendar for something serious, chances are you need medical attention.

Anyways, turns out that I’m still listed as a developer (an admin even!) on the Datetime project. That’s very generous of Dave, who has written the bulk of the stack. Perhaps I’ll inject some of those witty remarks back into the source, and finally retire Date::Discordian.