this post was submitted on 16 May 2026
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Linux devs are fighting the new age-gated internet (www.theverge.com)
submitted 20 hours ago by sanitation@lemmy.radio to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] artwork@lemmy.world 12 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 13 hours ago) (3 children)

A whole library, or a yet another ad for Python, sorry? Why not marvelous Perl, or any lovely PHP's or a JavaScript faker?
Why a library in the first place?

In case of PHP (checked in v8.1)

echo date('Y-m-d', rand(strtotime('-90 years'), strtotime('-18 years')));
// 2007-07-30

And, I had a snippet for JavaScript (tested in the current Chrome's EcmaScript).
We get the years in milliseconds, and substract from the current time.

console.log(new Date(Date.now() - 365*24*60*60*1000 * (18 + Math.random()*72)).toISOString().slice(0, 10));
// 1984-07-20

In shell even! Let's use the common suit GNU coreutils (e.g. v9.4).
We have 90y - 18y = 72 years, that is 26,280 days or ~26,297 days (source)

$ date -d "-18 years -$(( RANDOM % 26297 )) days" -- '+%F';
# 1976-04-06
[–] yaroto98@lemmy.world 6 points 6 hours ago* (last edited 6 hours ago) (1 children)

Mostly because it's starting with dob, what happens when they require a phone number, address, credit card, or social security number? Faker can fake all those in that library. But you're absolutely right, for one dob it is massive overkill.

Also, I'm do test automation for my career. Litterally use faker daily for generating test data. Defaulting to it is natural and familiar. Most use what they're familiar with, rarely the best solution for a task.

[–] artwork@lemmy.world 1 points 40 minutes ago* (last edited 39 minutes ago)

Roger that! Thank you for being a developer and improving the ineffably magnificent world! ✨

In this case, we do relatively the same, and usually in database seeding and model factories, I believe, but personally I am more into the Laravel and Symfony, where the mentioned above PHP library is used there under the hood.

Please to stay safe!

Related: https://laravel.com/docs/13.x/eloquent-factories

[–] ripcord@lemmy.world 12 points 10 hours ago (1 children)

Wtf is going on in this thread

[–] jimmy90@lemmy.world 1 points 4 hours ago

ikr

a couple of distro admins remind lawmakers that people can do what they want with their computers and it's python day on lemmy

[–] jesta@lemmy.world 23 points 13 hours ago

A whole library, or a yet another ad for Python, sorry?

This is more of a problem with how some people code more than python. I also find it irritating that some people import random libraries out of the internet to do simple things instead of actually spending the time to write two lines of code. Python has built in datetime library that could be used for this similar to the examples you gave.