1507
Runk
(thelemmy.club)
This is so true tho
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this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2026
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Is this a real example? Or are we just talking about linux here
Nebraska and 2003 have got to be fictional details, but there's several small programs or libraries that have some kind of similar story.
You weren't there for the Leftpad fiasco, I take it?
Nope, I was still a little too young
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident
For the uninformed. It still somehow both boggles my mind and makes 100% sense that people didn't just write this function when they needed something to pad strings.
Probably got put into a popular example and then everyone uses it because "that's how."
Huh... You know what that makes more sense than anything else I've come up with. I always just assumed it was lazy devs.
Something something Unix Philosophy. Write small programs that do one thing and do it well and then re-use that well tested code as often as you can rather than poorly re-implementing it over and over?
A huge proportion (most?) of server infrastructure runs on linux.
That's what I meant. I phrased it badly, i meant to ask if it was about Linux or something else
It was leftpad. A stupid little function that was used by like 90% of the internet, and it crashed everything during a name dispute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Npm_left-pad_incident