const at = (arr, i) => i >= 0 ? arr[i] : arr[arr.length + i];

Because at some point someone will - and probably has - make a library out of this, adding yet one more to the tens of thousands of files that my cruddy server can't handle already because of the sheer quantity.

Plus you're probably missing a few dozen edge cases and optimizations that the native version would incorporate.

We wouldn't have been in node_modules dependency hell if they incorporated a few more things into the standard library or language.

in my experience, the vast majority of node modules I have installed don't provide these tiny little functions, but are:

- frameworks like react or express and extensions for the same

- meaningful libraries like axios, ramda, date-fns or qs

- transpiler/bundler enhancements like webpack loaders or babel presets

I would prefer that the JS committee focused on bringing meaningful new capabilities to node and the browser that are currently lacking, like they did with the various HTML5 libraries, fetch(), ES classes and so on, rather than providing tiny functions that aren't even providing new functionality (array indexing is easy and idiomatic in JS). If there was no opportunity cost then sure, add tiny pointless builtin functions all day long.

ramda and date-fns are full of little such functions... The fact that util packs like these and lodash exist is a sign that Javascript's stdlib lacks mechanisms to deal with various common patterns.

FWIW, I consider `at` to be similar to some of the things you consider "new capabilities". `fetch` vs `XMLHttpRequest` is fairly analogous to `at` vs `arr[i]`, and similar arguments can be made about ES6 classes over prototypal classes, etc.

ramda is an immutable library - javascript is immutable. Some functions of date-fns could probably be part of the core, and in fact that's one of the areas I wish the JS WG would focus on as Date is just not a very useful class.

> `fetch` vs `XMLHttpRequest` is fairly analogous to `at` vs `arr[i]`

If you consider all syntactic sugar to be equivalent, no matter how minor the change, then anything above a basic Turing machine implementation is fairly analogous. The problem with XHR is that the interface was really bad. The interface for arr[i] is not really bad.