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 20 hours 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?