What's up with dates?

I have a question about why dates are like they are in ruby. In ruby,
we have Date, DateTime, and Time, all of which seem to store about the
same thing, but have vastly different methods with which to interact
with the data, so the class you'd want to use varies according to what
your task is. However, there isn't an easy way to convert between the
three, which has caused a great deal of annoyance over the years I've
been using Ruby.

In general, the situation with dates and times seems against the ideas
of ruby, and I'm curious how and why they came about, and whether
anything is going to be done about it in 1.9. Can anyone enlighten me?

-- 
Micah Wylde