Because it is such a common case? To invert your argument, why would you want millions of developers to have to waste their time writing this sort of thing for

Because it is such a common case? To invert your argument, why would you want millions of developers to have to waste their time writing this sort of thing for such a common need? Yes, it's clear that you could write the function correctly. Could everyone? What about bugs that aren't obvious? The runtime errors that result? Why would we want to waste so much developer time and effort globally, when we can just add .at() to the language?