How to obtain the current time in a number of standard APIs:

I googled for the programming language plus "current time", and obtained the following methods. The programming languages are the most popular languages on github.

Ruby:

now = Time.new

Java:

Date now = Calendar.getInstance().getTime();

Python:

now = datetime.datetime.now()

C#:

DateTime now = DateTime.Now;

PHP:

now = time()

Objective C:

now = [NSDate date]

JavaScript:

var now = new Date();

C++ (well, this is really C):

time_t now = time(NULL);

These are the standard methods in the standard APIs. Nonetheless, they introduce “Hidden global state” into your application (see Slide 16 on “Clean Code Talks - Global State and Singletons” in the Google testing blog). Hidden global state makes your code hard to test, yet it is ubiquitous. Somebody should do something about that! (Yes, I’m working on it :)