Ask HN: Is there a language to represent schedules and produce calendars? - urlwolf
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ColinWright
_The best way to get the right answer on the internet is not to ask a
question; it 's to post the wrong answer."_ \-- Cunningham's Law

I'd suggest that you create a language for doing this. Don't make it good,
make it barely functional. Don't do any research on what might already exist,
just go ahead and think about what you'd want, and implement a half-assed
version. Then post it here as a "Show HN:".

One of two things will happen:

(a) People will pile in to say, "It's good, but why didn't you just use XXXX";
or

(b) People will say "We've long needed something like this ... thanks!"

In the latter case, if you've put it on GitHub (or similar) people might
actually start offering improvements and sending you pull requests, and then
you'll end up with the thing you want that didn't previously exist.

~~~
sloaken
ColinWright I love your style!

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giaour
The iCalendar syntax
([https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICalendar))
is the dominant DSL.

~~~
Doxin
It's also not human readable, a confusing format, barely standardized, and
just a pain to work with in general.

A "programming language for dates" would be a pretty great thing to have I
bet. No more messing with confusing formats like iCalendar or cron schedules.

------
CamTin
The "remind" program has a pretty well-developed DSL to represent dates and
recurring schedules, with backends to produce postscript/html/etc calendars.

[https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/](https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/)

It's available already-packaged in most mainstream distros I know of.

