[twexler]

> There's nothing Node could or should have done about the lack of string padding. Node's "standard library" is first and foremost concerned with enabling network and filesystem IO. JS on the other hand even lacks a built-in way to handle dates properly (the Date class is largely an afterthought based on Java).

That's absolutely incorrect. Now, I might be using a slightly contrived example here, but take RPython and compare it with Python. Both use mostly the same syntax (i.e. ECMAScript vs Node.js), but one is extensively much more feature-filled than the other because it targets general-purpose programming(Python) vs a very specific purpose language, used as a lower level "Framework" if you will (RPython). RPython has no need to implement something like `left-pad` (although because it's a subset of Python, it's sort of already implemented)

With RPython, it's intended you build things on top of it (which is how I view ECMAScript), whereas with Python (more like Node.js) you'd expect that to...exist.

The fact of the matter is, the language teams in these examples had completely different goals and I personally believe that Node.js should have gone more the Python route and had an extremely strong standard library that would handle mundane tasks like `left-pad` does. It disappoints me that the Node.js team (outside of the ECMA technical committee, which designs the language itself) does not thing it should be responsible for this kind of simple tooling and instead rather passes it off to developers.