Programs/functions like left-pad do not follow the unix philosophy (which the author did say). The idea of the unix philosophy is to write less programs. Not wr

Programs/functions like left-pad do not follow the unix philosophy (which the author did say). The idea of the unix philosophy is to write less programs. Not write a ton of tiny programs, but a small number of composable programs. So instead of left-pad, right-pad, middle-pad, and anything else to get specific need you can use sprintf which can format a string in general, one program that can do implement the features of all of those. It is about “coding the permitter, not the area”, so if you have NxM features to build, don’t write N*M individual programs/functions, instead write N+M programs/functions that can be composed together to get all NxM features. This video explains it well: https://youtu.be/3Ea3pkTCYx4 https://youtu.be/3Ea3pkTCYx4