That all makes perfect sense. Just two points to add:

1. People come to this site a look for examples of code to copy or adapt. If you're writing code here that is just a quick hack (and there's no reason why you shouldn't do that) then please clearly mark it as such so that it doesn't get misused in the future.
2. There are, of course, times when running external programs is a good idea (as long as you're aware of my caveats above). Date and time handling is never one of those times :-)