For context, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident
The man page for a unix binary is at least two orders of magnitude larger. At some point, the "Unix philosophy" doesn't make sense anymore. I mean, it couldn't even rightpad.
oh look at me, 589 published packages on npm! with 5 700 quadripillion weekly installs!
I think the left-pad incident helped shatter that myth. He we had huge packages depending on a package which padded a string in an inefficient manner.
It turns out that the many eyeballs of the bazaar had averted their gaze from what was actually happening, which is a system of impossible to audit dependency chains.
I think it also shows the impact of using a language with a poor standard library.
Padding is absolutely something that should be available as an extension over String.
If JavaScript were controlled in the same manner that Go, Rust, Java, .NET, python etc, then it would have been added years ago.
Apparently it has now finally arrived in ES2026: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...
In what way? Have the dependency trees gotten significantly smaller since then?
I installed `pass` (the lightweight password manager) on a fresh headless system the other day and it brought in like 60 packages including a bunch of X stuff.
Installing 'pass' pulled in: desktop-file-utils emacs-filesystem git-core libpng qrencode qrencode-libs
Plus weak (optional) dependencies: libwayland-client mailcap wl-clipboard xdg-utils
12 packages, 5 MB download, 24 MB installed. Could be worse, could be better.
I was honestly expecting Fedora to have less than that.
One of the big trigger is the dependency pass->xclip. That sets off a big cascade of X.
ES2017 [1]. The MDN docs always link the latest version of the spec; the year in the link doesn't correspond to the version where it was added. The proposal was already mostly done at the time of the incident [2]
[1] https://tc39.es/ecma262/2017/#sec-string.prototype.padstart [2] https://github.com/tc39/proposal-string-pad-start-end