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> To you, I’d suggest using less charged language like sanity. To the grandparent, I'd suggest keeping the language as it is. Status quo in the current program

> To you, I’d suggest using less charged language like sanity. To the grandparent, I'd suggest keeping the language as it is. Status quo in the current programming ecosystem is often insane, and when it is, we should call it out. > it’s not productive or nice to imply that people who choose a different path from you are insane. In a general sense, I agree. However, when it comes to programming, insanity is so widely accepted as normality that I think it would be counterproductive to blunt the language used to describe it. As an example of insanity for those who may (justifiably) think I'm talking out of my bottom - in NodeJS ecosystem the standard library is so bad that it is considered acceptable to use dependencies for even the simplest tasks, which caused the `leftpad` incident which broke countless programs.

lifthrasiir 3y ago
Leftpad is not appropriate here because Node.js didn't add any additional String methods anyway. Therefore it could have been prevented if JS proper had enough String methods beforehand, regardless of attitude towards dependencies. Grandparent's points in comparison are more about the scope of standard libraries. (And in terms of convenient String routines, Go is still a bit inferior to Python!)
- bheadmaster 3y ago
  > Therefore it could have been prevented if JS proper had enough String methods beforehand, regardless of attitude towards dependencies. Grandparent's points in comparison are more about the scope of standard libraries. Leftpad could've just as well be a part of some standard library, like... > in terms of convenient String routines, Go is still a bit inferior to Python ... Go strings library :) https://pkg.go.dev/strings https://pkg.go.dev/strings
  - lifthrasiir 3y ago
    Maybe I should've been more clear about "scope". Standard libraries can pick their scope of functionalities and depth (or completeness) for each functionality. Nowadays every programming language is expected to come with a good string support, which is about the scope. But there are a lot of string operations you can support. PHP for example has `soundex` and `metaphone` functions for computing a phonetic comparison key. Should other languages support them as well? I don't think so, and that's about the depth or completeness because you can never support 100% of use cases with standard libraries alone. Ideally you want to cover (say) ~90% of use cases with a minimal number of routines. Leftpad was clearly due to the lack of depth in JavaScript and Node.js standard libraries. JavaScript now has `String.prototype.padStart`, and an apparent name difference suggests a good reason that some standard library may want to avoid it: internationalization is complex. A common use case is to make it aligned by padding space characters, but that obviously breaks for many non-Latin scripts [1]. And yet many people tried to use it, so `left-pad` was born with a suboptimal interface, and we know the rest. HTTP support is different. I totally agree that HTTP is something you want to support in a sorta native fashion, but a standard library is not the only way to do that. In fact it is not a good place to do that because it is generally slower to change (Go is a notable exception but only because its core team is very well funded and strongly minded). Python did support HTTP in its standard library for a long time, but it doesn't support HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 at all and Requests or urllib3 are now the de facto standard in Python HTTP handling. Modern languages try to balance this issue by having a non-standard but directly curated set of libraries. Rust `regex` is a good example, which may be surprising given than even C++ has a native regex support. But by not being a part of the standard library, `regex` was able to move much faster and leverage a vast array of other Rust libraries, and it is now one of the best `regex` libraries throughout all languages. That's what nindalf wanted to say by different "ways". [1] For example, `"한글".padStart(5)` will give you `" 한글"` but its visual width is larger than 5 "normal" characters. This is not merely a matter of fonts and Unicode has a dedicated database for the character width ("East Asian Width"). Some characters are still ambiguous even in this situation (e.g. ↑), and the correct answer with respect to internationalization would be: don't, use a markup language or (for terminals) a cursor movement instead.

lifthrasiir 3y ago

Leftpad is not appropriate here because Node.js didn't add any additional String methods anyway. Therefore it could have been prevented if JS proper had enough String methods beforehand, regardless of attitude towards dependencies. Grandparent's points in comparison are more about the scope of standard libraries. (And in terms of convenient String routines, Go is still a bit inferior to Python!)

bheadmaster 3y ago
> Therefore it could have been prevented if JS proper had enough String methods beforehand, regardless of attitude towards dependencies. Grandparent's points in comparison are more about the scope of standard libraries. Leftpad could've just as well be a part of some standard library, like... > in terms of convenient String routines, Go is still a bit inferior to Python ... Go strings library :) https://pkg.go.dev/strings https://pkg.go.dev/strings
- lifthrasiir 3y ago
  Maybe I should've been more clear about "scope". Standard libraries can pick their scope of functionalities and depth (or completeness) for each functionality. Nowadays every programming language is expected to come with a good string support, which is about the scope. But there are a lot of string operations you can support. PHP for example has `soundex` and `metaphone` functions for computing a phonetic comparison key. Should other languages support them as well? I don't think so, and that's about the depth or completeness because you can never support 100% of use cases with standard libraries alone. Ideally you want to cover (say) ~90% of use cases with a minimal number of routines. Leftpad was clearly due to the lack of depth in JavaScript and Node.js standard libraries. JavaScript now has `String.prototype.padStart`, and an apparent name difference suggests a good reason that some standard library may want to avoid it: internationalization is complex. A common use case is to make it aligned by padding space characters, but that obviously breaks for many non-Latin scripts [1]. And yet many people tried to use it, so `left-pad` was born with a suboptimal interface, and we know the rest. HTTP support is different. I totally agree that HTTP is something you want to support in a sorta native fashion, but a standard library is not the only way to do that. In fact it is not a good place to do that because it is generally slower to change (Go is a notable exception but only because its core team is very well funded and strongly minded). Python did support HTTP in its standard library for a long time, but it doesn't support HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 at all and Requests or urllib3 are now the de facto standard in Python HTTP handling. Modern languages try to balance this issue by having a non-standard but directly curated set of libraries. Rust `regex` is a good example, which may be surprising given than even C++ has a native regex support. But by not being a part of the standard library, `regex` was able to move much faster and leverage a vast array of other Rust libraries, and it is now one of the best `regex` libraries throughout all languages. That's what nindalf wanted to say by different "ways". [1] For example, `"한글".padStart(5)` will give you `" 한글"` but its visual width is larger than 5 "normal" characters. This is not merely a matter of fonts and Unicode has a dedicated database for the character width ("East Asian Width"). Some characters are still ambiguous even in this situation (e.g. ↑), and the correct answer with respect to internationalization would be: don't, use a markup language or (for terminals) a cursor movement instead.