Exploring the New Date.shift/2 Function in Elixir 1.17

The article discusses the new Date.shift/2 function introduced in Elixir 1.17, which simplifies date manipulation by allowing users to shift dates forward or backward by days, weeks, months, or years. Unlike previous methods that used arithmetic operations (like Date.add/2) to add days, Date.shift respects the calendar by considering the specific number of days in each month. This means shifting the end of January by a month results in the last day of February (February 29 in a leap year), rather than simply adding 30 days. However, it also highlights that reversing the shift may yield unexpected results, demonstrating that the order of operations matters when manipulating dates with this new function.