111–120 of 385 posts
I agree with Microsoft/Google/KDE's order. The author's situation is extremely rare, and the situation where someone wants "10" to be before "9" is far more common. Moreover, desktops don't label this sorting "alphabetical" (E: and it would really be "lexicographic"*), they label it "by name" (an informal criteria), so technically they're not lying. > I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead…
I agree with Microsoft/Google/KDE's order. The author's situation is extremely rare, and the situation where someone wants "10" to be before "9" is far more common. Moreover, desktops don't label this sorting "alphabetical" (E: and it would really be "lexicographic"*), they label it "by name" (an informal criteria), so technically they're not lying. > I miss the time when computers did what you told them to, instead…
I think the only problem is that it's a surprise and mystery, particularly because "dumb" alphabetical sort has existed forever. When they "fixed this" for the 99% of regular users cases, they should have made it as separate "smart natural sort" option separate from the "strict alphabetical sort" option (next to date, size, etc). Simple and obvious, rather than surprisingly different from the decades of experience th…
I agree with the article.
I liked computers better when everyone hated them, and for the reasons they hated them..
This is reminding me of the whole "Worse is better" essay and debate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27916370 The author wants the "worse" sort, one based on ASCII/Unicode codepoints, without any intelligence for numbers that 99% of GUI users want. For their purposes, they've assumed something about the implementation, to the point that a convenience feature is actually a misfeature for them. But the author her…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I guess you mean "after"? Otherwise it seems to me you're agreeing with OP. Depends on which direction you're sorting in, no?
> Depends on which direction you're sorting in, no? In a vacuum: yes. In this particular case: no, because we have the article's context clarifying that we're talking about ascending order.
It was only clear to me because I could guess where they were going. They were complaining about natural sort vs alphabetical sort, which is a case I’ve run into many times, so I could see the argument coming.
The irony to me was that they were already altering how they named files to fit what they thought the computer wanted by prepending a zero to get a proper alphabetic sort. And even after that, some computers didn’t follow their idea of what it should be doing.
Then if you want something to change, just ask the butler. If the app is open source and doesn't support the requested feature, the butler might even be able to code it up.
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Here's a different scenario: filenames with dates in them. Consider September Budget and October Budget . September is the equivalent of 9, October of 10. Which comes first for natural sorting? Remember, the file modify date may not be useful here since you may have wrapped up the September budget on October 1st while the prior edit to the October budget may have been on September 20th. The problem is that there is n…
the one true way: budget_09.csv, budget_10.csv
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the only problem is that it's a surprise and mystery, particularly because "dumb" alphabetical sort has existed forever. When they "fixed this" for the 99% of regular users cases, they should have made it as separate "smart natural sort" option separate from the "strict alphabetical sort" option (next to date, size, etc). Simple and obvious, rather than surprisingly different from the decades of experience th…
It's not just the one decision though; there are literally thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of these decisions in most software. You want every single one of them to have an option? You want it to support every single combination? At some point, it is ridiculous. Sometimes you just have to decide how your software is going to work and not leave every single decision to the user.
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Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the only problem is that it's a surprise and mystery, particularly because "dumb" alphabetical sort has existed forever. When they "fixed this" for the 99% of regular users cases, they should have made it as separate "smart natural sort" option separate from the "strict alphabetical sort" option (next to date, size, etc). Simple and obvious, rather than surprisingly different from the decades of experience th…
It's not just the one decision though; there are literally thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of these decisions in most software. You want every single one of them to have an option? You want it to support every single combination? At some point, it is ridiculous. Sometimes you just have to decide how your software is going to work and not leave every single decision to the user.