1529
Runk
(lemmy.nz)
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
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
You weren't there for the Leftpad fiasco, I take it?
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?
Nope, I was still a little too young
Nebraska and 2003 have got to be fictional details, but there's several small programs or libraries that have some kind of similar story.