Show HN: NaturalCron – Human-Readable Scheduling for .NET (With Fluent Builder) • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: NaturalCron – Human-Readable Scheduling for .NET (With Fluent Builder)

#11

Post by zipping1549 » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 7:04 AM UTC

perching_aix wrote: post #7

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #3

> Because memorizing 0 18 * * 1-5 is harder than understanding every day between monday and friday at 6:00pm Really? Does “Every day between Monday and Friday” include Monday and Friday? One could think the days between Monday and Friday are Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Why people don’t just learn cron syntax is beyond me.

> Why people don’t just learn cron syntax is beyond me. Maybe the better question to ponder is why is it something that needs explicit learning. It's a basic task scheduler. The *nix format hell in general drives me insane. Immensely glad for the recent-ish trend of lots of applications at least slowly adopting JSON and others as both config and output options.

> why is it something that needs explicit learning. It's a basic task scheduler.

You still have to learn what exactly this sort of software can understand and that is, imo, no less of a time/effort needed to learn cron.

Re: Show HN: NaturalCron – Human-Readable Scheduling for .NET (With Fluent Builder)

#12

Post by herbst » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 7:39 AM UTC

easygenes wrote: post #9

I think this is good for people who only have occasional need for scheduling. I’ve used cron enough that I appreciate its compactness and would find this cumbersome and difficult.

I find Cron to be one of the clearest and most elegant Syntax solutions out there. Like you only have to understand it once and can assume the rest from looking at it. That's super elegant

Re: Show HN: NaturalCron – Human-Readable Scheduling for .NET (With Fluent Builder)

#13

Post by teapot7 » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 8:53 AM UTC

Cron is definitely not the biggest problem in my life. I've never had a problem with its format. I think this is a solution to a problem I don't have - and I tend to find that "English like" formats don't do me any favours.

Re: Show HN: NaturalCron – Human-Readable Scheduling for .NET (With Fluent Builder)

#14

Post by lr0 » Sun, Aug 03, 2025, 1:47 PM UTC

That's nice but I don't think Cron syntax is a big of a problem, most of the time.

Re: Show HN: NaturalCron – Human-Readable Scheduling for .NET (With Fluent Builder)

#15

Post by joshstrange » Mon, Aug 04, 2025, 11:18 AM UTC

How does it handle “bi-weekly”?

At the end of the day, anyone using cron-type things should just learn cron syntax, it’s really not that difficult and there are a number of websites that you can use to assist or spot-check your work.

I’m always incredibly resistant to “human readable” for things like this because there is just too much ambiguity.

Re: Show HN: NaturalCron – Human-Readable Scheduling for .NET (With Fluent Builder)

#16

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 04, 2025, 3:44 PM UTC

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: NaturalCron – Human-Readable Scheduling for .NET (With Fluent Builder)

#17

Post by hugoj0s3 » Mon, Aug 04, 2025, 3:46 PM UTC

Cron is great and widely used—I’m not trying to replace it. This is just another option for situations where you need something more readable for non-technical users or when you want to store schedules in a database and display them in plain language. There are valid use cases for both approaches.

The goal is provide a format that’s user-friendly while still being precise enough for developers and systems to rely on. It’s especially useful for things like configurable schedules in apps, admin dashboards, or any context where end users and developers need to share the same language.

I appreciated the feedback and comments.