I understand how we got to where we are now (I think) and I understand why we have some of the features and misfeatures we have now. And Data.Time is sure an improvement on System.Time. But, among other infelicities, why does the new time package need the old-locale one?

Anyway, the main issue is that we have bells and whistles for timezones and formats and parsing and adts and UTCTime and UT1 and POSIX and NominalDiffTime and DiffTime and soforth, and lots of functionality is there, but on the whole we have a big painful mess that sends me to hoogle repeatedly to accomplish the simplest tasks.

Datetime stuff is hard. Good Datetime APIs take a great deal of work and thought. Python, as I recall, does a crummy job, at least in the base. Java did an infamously crummy job.

But Java now has joda time (http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/) which by all accounts is lovely.

I don't think we need new time libs, but we need at the minimum a single simple sane layer on top of them that makes simple things simple, while still keeping complex things possible.

This isn't a glamorous or researchy project, but it would improve the experience of pretty much every Haskell programmer, and probably greatly help beginners in particular, for whom the current maze of newtypes is daunting and confusing.