what bothers me the most about leftpad is that it isn’t even good
this is the code for leftpad
function leftpad (str, len, ch) {
str = String(str);
var i = -1;
if (!ch && ch !== 0) ch = ' ';
len = len - str.length;
while (++i < len) {
str = ch + str;
}
return str;
}
here is how i would write that
function leftpad (str, len, ch) {
if ( str.length < len ) {
var fillChar = !ch ? " " : String(ch)[0];
return Array(len - str.length).fill(fillChar).join("") + str;
} else {
return str;
}
}
and these are the same people who argue semantic versioning is “important” and “meaningful”
what bothers me third most about leftpad is that this is not a situation where DRY is applicable; it is clearer and less ambiguous to just write this as a one‐to‐three‐liner directly in your code
the number of times when i have written
const hex = codepoint.toString(16);
return `U+${hex.length >= 4 ? "" : Array(4 - hex.length).fill(0).join("")}${hex.toUpperCase()}`;
it’s not that hard
what bothers me the zeroth most about leftpad is that the criticisms of this thread are not in any way specific to leftpad
and what actually got me thinking about this was the YAML processor which ships by default in Ruby and is used in virtually every Rails application
what bothers me the second most about leftpad is that packages released “stable” versions while having a dependency on something versioned 0.0.3