Looks like they should have called that function
sortOf()Honestly this being javascript I expected the answer to be
[4, 1, 100000, 30, 21](sorted alphabetically by name)
“Actually, this one isn’t ‘Wat’, it’s part of what makes Ruby awesome and powerful, unless of course you actually do this, at which point it’s ‘Wat’”
let’s talk about Ruby
Ruby like most programming languages doesn’t support bare words, [undefined variable exception]
but if you define a particular method_missing, suddenly Ruby supports bare words. [ruby repeating what was typed]
Now this isn’t deserving of wat. this actually shows just how awesome Ruby is. [Drummer_t-rex.jpg]
But if you actually do this then…
Wat
This is due to the default sorter in JavaScript sorting by the string value. The reason for that is that this won’t create errors at runtime. Since JavaScript does not have types, this is the safest way of sorting.
This works:
const unsorted = [1, 100000, 21, 30, 4] const sorted = unsorted.sort((a, b) => a - b)ah yes, a reasonable solution to that problem that any human would think of
ah yes, a reasonable problem that any human would think of – “what if someone tries to sort a list containing some integers and some arrays, and our interpreter needs to keep chugging instead of telling the programmer they fucked up?”
Which is a fine decision if you have a programming language to do silly stuff on a personal geocities page, but a horrible one when you start using that language to handle serious data. Silently ignoring what’s probably a bug is dangerous.
Which is a fine decision if you have a programming language to do silly stuff on a personal geocities page
And that is, of course, what it was designed for.
JS is brilliant considering that it was created by one dude in 10 days. Nobody thought it would become nearly as important as it has become.
As a non-programmer, why does it do this? Sorting by leftmost digit seems super dumb.
You can put any type of value in an array in JavaScript. You can have numbers, strings, booleans, arrays, and objects. So what should the default sort function sort by? Sorting by numbers makes sense, but what if it wanted to sort strings instead?
When you don’t know what value is in an array ahead of time you can’t assume how to sort it. When you’re controlling the program you can provide a sort function for the type of values you know will be in it, but when you’re writing the standard default sort function, there’s only one type that you can convert all the other types to safely and simply in the most predictable way, which is strings.
