Hi Scott thanks for your effort. I hope it’s OK when i give a honest feedback how i feel about this.I read up on the java documentation and played around with this the last day(s) and must say all in all it doesn’t feel very safe, when this is the attitude.
The thing is i don’t want to discover more surprises with this, that you say they will be a little less damaging is not very reassuring!! I found not good how quickly you declared that this is not a bug, and forget about it when in reality Knime directs its users straigth forward to this bug and a lot of people will have wrong calculations because of this.
Generally with data analysis: The software gives you always an output it’s just often wrong, if it gives you an error message be thankful for the money that you saved. KNIME is a bit opaque in this regard it gives the big advantage of “visual programming” to the users, but if KNIME uses jvm internally it kinda has the responsibility to make it as clear as possible what is to expected from it on a node by node basis.
The error that occured changed the date by a whole year and Knime lets the user combine YYYY with an exact date and month, which is simply wrong and shouldn’t even exist.
To say how greate visual executable workflows are (and in this regard Knime is really wonderful!), but when something goes wrong then its java fault is somewhat not to helpful.
It’s not true neither KNIME creates this bug by giving the user a lot of wrong suggestions or even Autoguesses an erroneous format where the year digits created with week-based-year are combined with an exact month and day of month which introduces the bug and creates wrong results…
So if i had as a user a wish: More ownership for error-free calculations and not the approach: of course the results are wrong on page 220 of the java standard edition 8 page documentation you could have guessed why that is, when your are smart.
That when Knime uses Java standard edition 8 for a node (which is rather old, how will it be handled when Knime switches in 2 years will the nodes than just change under the hood without the user noticing?) that there is a spirit of liability for the results of this too. Becaues a lot of the users don’t even know that it uses java DateTimeFormatter (like myself in the beginnig) and what all can go wrong with this and another node might use Python or Panda or something else with their troubles. Visual programming doesn’t make to much sense when you have to be an experienced java/whatever coder to ensure that the results are right.
But since this thread is closed i will open a new thread with more on point description of what i found out…
Ok rant is over - besides this i love Knime… And have a good one!