Comment by joshkel

The main selling point for me is that it has proper data times for dates, times, etc.

Most date/time libraries that I've seen have a only single "date/time" or "timestamp" type, then they have to do things like representing "January 13 2026" as "January 13 2026 at midnight local time" or "January 13 2026 at midnight UTC."

Temporal has full-fledged data types representing the different concepts: an Instant is a point in time. A PlainDate is just a date. A PlainTime is just a time. ("We eat lunch at 11am each day.") A ZonedDateTime is an Instant in a known time zone. Etc.

Temporal draws a lot of inspiration from Java's Joda-Time (which also went on to inspire .NET's Noda Time, Java's official java.time API, and JavaScript's js-joda). This is helpful; it means that some concepts can transfer if you're working in other languages. And, more importantly, it means that it benefits from a lot of careful thought on how to ergonomically and effectively represent date/time complexities.