Left-pad as a service

Nice, it is even bug compatible

http://api.left-pad.io/?str=foo&len=7&ch=12

return {"str":"12121212foo"} and not {"str":"1212foo"}

As a friend said on IRC, it's kind of sad that the website is not made with bootstrap.

Well, Jane Street found Ocaml's standard library lacking and went on to build a better one. To me it seems much better than build a "standard library" piece-by-piece from one-function packages.

> How stupid of people to reuse small often used functions that only do one thing well.

This is a straw man argument. The reason so many people are criticizing left-pad et al is about the cost of adding a dependency.

> trust their package manager

That's exactly the problem: you're assuming that a package manager can be trusted. The network isn't reliable, packages can changed innocently or maliciously, and mistakes happen.

The "stupid" part is pretending these have zero risk, and the part that makes some people angry is when they also have to depend on this zero-risk assumption transitively through another library.

> It's not javascript devs fault that the standard library is so piss poor

Nobody is claiming it was. However, Javascript devs are responsible when they add critical dependencies on external components. They are also responsible when they publish libraries that extend those critical dependencies to the people that use their library without a very good reason.

There are two main factors that you're ignoring:

The first is that every added dependency creates ongoing cost, and that in a world where it becomes typical for a single application to have hundreds of dependencies, this cost is non-trivial and is, at minimum, worth considering.

The second is that even before the left-pad fiasco, a lot of experienced individuals (myself included) believed that npm is fragile by design; and that the dependency situation means that if you want to avoid nasty surprises, you need to pin every version of every dependency and you need to keep your own local copies of all of the files in case something like this happens.

Overall, you're accusing others of failing to fully understand the situation and of being condescending and rude; but you're doing it in a way that is condescending and rude, and that fails to fully understand the situation. Responses like yours are completely unhelpful. They do not change hearts or minds. They do not help npm fix their problems. And your caricature of those who find the situation funny is so distorted from reality that nobody will see themselves in it.

The fact that your post is top of HN is just more evidence that Hacker News is no longer a useful website. It's kind of funny, YC gets better every year, but HN gets worse. I wonder at what point Sam and pg will realize that this cesspool is actually hurting their brand.