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After playing with a Rails project that needed to do a lot of date maniupulation, I was shown another of the many "small" differences that make you so glad you are in Ruby-land.

With Ruby, and the time extensions that Rails adds to the Ruby time module, you get to do things like:

20.minutes.ago
20.hours.from_now

now = Time.now
now.at_beginning_of_year
now.midnight
now.last_month
now.monday
now.next_year
now.tomorrow
now.yesterday
now.seconds_since_midnight

This is just a touch of what you can do.

The thought of doing a lot of this work in Java with the great java.util.Calendar and java.util.Date makes me cringe. I have a DateUtil that I use to do a lot of work, and there are other utils like JodaTime etc, but none compare in my opinion.