For the uninformed. It still somehow both boggles my mind and makes 100% sense that people didn't just write this function when they needed something to pad strings.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Probably got put into a popular example and then everyone uses it because "that's how."

[–] Hobo@lemmy.world 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Huh... You know what that makes more sense than anything else I've come up with. I always just assumed it was lazy devs.

[–] captain_aggravated@sh.itjust.works 2 points 1 day ago

Something something Unix Philosophy. Write small programs that do one thing and do it well and then re-use that well tested code as often as you can rather than poorly re-implementing it over and over?

[–] davetortoise@reddthat.com 11 points 2 days ago (1 children)

A huge proportion (most?) of server infrastructure runs on linux.

[–] engagewithzorp@lemmy.world 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

That's what I meant. I phrased it badly, i meant to ask if it was about Linux or something else

[–] nomecks@lemmy.wtf 3 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

It was leftpad. A stupid little function that was used by like 90% of the internet, and it crashed everything during a name dispute.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident