Hence left-pad. And this pet-peeve of mine https://nodejs.org/docs/latest/api/process.html#processargv (who cares about the node fullpath in argv[0]?)
The problem with left pad was a security one, not a package bloat one.
> It is highly probable that the majority of current string padding implementations are inefficient. Bringing this into the platform will improve performance of the web, and developer productivity as they no longer have to implement these common functions.
“It’s too trivial” is not why left-pad was in the news. Go read about it to understand the actual issue: https://www.theregister.com/AMP/2017/07/12/javascript_spec_s...
Of course it was useful, hence why most non-crappy languages had it in its stdlib from inception pretty much
But building a package just to do left-pad is stupid, especially since it can be implemented in a couple of lines
Nobody thinks leftPad was not a useful function. The question is, was it useful enough to counter all the risks of npm, probably not. In the stdlib there is no such risk.
My point has been this whole time that left-pad was not a story of a trivial function needlessly pulled from an external source as the person I replied to had claimed, and it appears you agree. Good!