I just think there should be an intent argument specifiable to the library to indicate that the duration in question refers to an event that has happened in the past.
In such a scenario, the library should mark the duration as happening "just now" and possibly flag a warning or raise an exception.
The reason I say this is that, humanly speaking, "Your message was sent 23 seconds from now" is amusing at best to developers who know what's happening (negative time delta) and linguistically confusing to general users ("was sent" vs "from now").
I just think there should be an intent argument specifiable to the library to indicate that the duration in question refers to an event that has happened in the past.
In such a scenario, the library should mark the duration as happening "just now" and possibly flag a warning or raise an exception.
The reason I say this is that, humanly speaking, "Your message was sent 23 seconds from now" is amusing at best to developers who know what's happening (negative time delta) and linguistically confusing to general users ("was sent" vs "from now").