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There are a lot of blogs out there, and they don't update frequently. Ideally RSS feed readers would come back into common use (which IM[completely unqualified]O won't happen until one comes out with the sorts of social features that can really drive uptake), but until then, have you considered putting together and promoting a blog/website aggregator for your field?

I try to follow a certain academic field from the outside, but there are too many blogs, old online journal archives, websites, etc. out there for me to keep track of or even find, so I end up reading the few blogs that update somewhat regularly and academia.edu and that's it.

Yeah, I think the natural question here is: why doesn't TC39 round up all these basic packages and add them to the standard library? I've seen other languages criticized for having too large a standard library, but if this is the alternative...

left-pad was released under WTFPL, so in this particular case there'd be no legal barriers to it. (And I'd assume that, for any libraries with a restrictive enough license, it wouldn't be a hard sell on TC39's part -- if they put out an announcement that they were going to do that, I'd go panning for street cred, and I wouldn't be the only one.)

An alternative could be to pull all this stuff together into one big bucket of Legos and package it with a code analysis tool at the beginning of your build process to strip out everything you don't need from the bucket... but I'd guess that's either already been done or a stupid idea for reasons I don't know yet.