There are many ways to specify scheduled items. Cron has 10 8,20 * 8 1-5 and iCalendar has RRULE and Roaring Penguin brings us REMIND. There's a new cross-platform DSL called Schyntax, created by my Stack Overflow coworker Bret Copeland.
The goal of Schyntax is to be human readable, easy to pick up, and intuitive. For example, to specify every hour from 900 UTC until 1700 UTC, one writes hours(9..17)
What if you want to run every five minutes during the week, and every half hour on weekends? Group the sub-conditions in curly braces:
{ days(mon..fri) min(*%5) } { days(sat..sun) min(*%30) }
It is case-insensitive, whitespace-insensitive, and always UTC.
You can read more examples in his blog post: Schyntax Part 1: The Language. In Schyntax Part 2: The Task Runner (aka "Schtick") you'll see how to create a scheduled task runner using the Schyntax library.
You can easily use the library from JavaScript and C#. Bret is open-sourcing it in hopes that other implementations are created. Personally I'd love to see a Go implementation.
The Schynatx syntax and sample libraries are on Github.
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