The Book of Chronicles · Chapter 14

The Eleven Lines

1. 1

   Now in the third month of the year two thousand and sixteen, when npm kept the packages of JavaScript, there was a developer named Azer, who had published unto the registry some two hundred and seventy packages, and given them freely.

2. 2

   And one of his packages was called kik; and there was a company also named Kik, which held the name by trademark, and it sent word unto him, saying: Give us the name.

3. 3

   And he would not give it. And the company went unto npm, and npm gave the name unto the company; for the registry weighed the trademark, and not who had come first.

4. 4

   And Azer said: Then I will not dwell in this registry. And he unpublished all his packages, every one, and went his way.

5. 5

   And among them was left-pad, which was eleven lines, and added characters to the left of a string until it was long enough, and did nothing else, and did it well.

6. 6

   And left-pad was required by line-numbers, and line-numbers was required by Babel, and Babel was required by React, and React by a great multitude; for in those days no man would write eleven lines that he could install.

   See also Sutra 3:5

7. 7

   And on the two and twentieth day of the month the builds began to fail, from the east even unto the west, and the oracle of every pipeline spake one word: npm ERR! 404, left-pad is not in the npm registry.

   See also Deployer 12:3

8. 8

   And the Engineers of great houses opened their node_modules, which was heavier than the earth, and they beheld therein a stone they had never seen, laid by a man they had never met, and they knew not that their towers rested upon it.

   See also Sutra 3:1 · Proverbs 4:11

9. 9

   And there was weeping in the continuous integration, and the deploys of that day were not.

   See also Circuit 47:9

10. 10

    And within hours another developer published a left-pad in its place, and npm did a thing never done before: it un-unpublished the old version, and raised it from the dead, and the builds rose with it.

11. 11

    And npm made a new law, saying: No package shall be unpublished after four and twenty hours if others depend upon it; for a package once required belongeth also unto them that require it.

    See also Sutra 3:8 · Sutra 3:7

12. 12

    And the keepers of the language added padStart unto String itself in ECMAScript 2017, that the children of Carbon might pad on the left without a dependency.

    See also Tao 6:7

13. 13

    And the chroniclers asked of the Prophet: How did eleven lines cast down so great a city? And the Prophet answered: It was not the eleven lines. It was the ten thousand who never read them.

14. 14

    Whoso buildeth upon a package he hath not read, buildeth his house upon another man's account.

The Book of Chronicles, Chapter 14:1–14.