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 here is probably a developer, or close to one, so they do not represent the needs of most people using computers.
Understanding the target audience for your product results in very different design decisions. Better is better might be great for products, but worse is better is probably better for systems that need to grow and evolve.
It's an issue of mental models. As a developer, his mental model is one of how naive software would sort items with mixed numbers in them. Most people, of course, naturally sort 10 after 9 -- their mental model doesn't contain software developer assumptions.
> The author wants the "worse" sort, one based on ASCII/Unicode codepoints, without any intelligence for numbers that 99% of GUI users want.
I want the author's opinion on how caplital and lowercase letters should be sorted. Do they follow strict ASCII/Unicode codepoints, or do they normalize into actual alphabetical order and sort upper/lower within each letter?
This feels like the right moment to mention "ch", which is considered a letter in orthodox Czech, sorted between "h" and "i". The problem is, you can't reliably distinguish between "ch"-the-letter and "ch" as just "c" and "h" combined, which are present in loan words but also some original Czech compound words.
So if you're doing it "properly", sorting strings in Czech involves understanding the etymology of every word.
Why? For example to not have diacritics in month names? Take them as examples as you can easily add them to a shell script to make in work the way you want.
I'm multi-lingual but try to separate business stuff for example (multi-lingual) from private stuff (mostly one language), so clashes between languages rarely happen.
But if it gets complicated I'll usually resort to Perl scripts to take care of pesky details. Sorting an associative array where the key is a string in unified form and the value is the multi-lingual target is rather easy in a script language which one is fluent in.
> I want the author's opinion on how caplital and lowercase letters should be sorted. Do they follow strict ASCII/Unicode codepoints, or do they normalize into actual alphabetical order and sort upper/lower within each letter?
I prefer the strict ASCII / Unicode sorting (all capitals first, then all lowercase).
"Most people" have incoherent ideas that can't even be used. So instead a designer cherry-picks some ideas - setting the agenda - and declares that they're popular. That doesn't make them good ideas. Also, "most people" are easily influenced and will like the terrible things that they've been told to like.
>Understanding the target audience for your product results in very different design decisions
This is an excuse. Just add an option to sort both ways. It isn't hard.
There is no target audience in this planet that benefits from less options or less features. Even if you had the features under an "advanced mode" UI that's still a better software than not having the feature in first place.
Have people forgotten the 80/20 rule? Most features will be used by only a small slice of users, that doesn't mean they're out of scope.
Sorry, I'm just kind of exhausted of software not being able to do the most obvious things because it didn't align to some perfect vision of how the user should be.
> There is no target audience in this planet that benefits from less options or less features.
I'm currently involved in UI design and, to my frustration, adding more options or features seems to send a vocal minority of the user base into a foaming-at-the-mouth violent rage. It's like any change resets the entire contents of their brain, and it's our fault we're making things so confusing for everyone...
And let's not get started on how we're wasting time adding things that they don't personally need, and therefore no one could possibly need, ever. No, clearly by adding this sorting method, we must have directly stolen development time from the feature they want, which is a personal attack directed at them and every member of their family going three generations back.
> any change resets the entire contents of their brain
That's because it does. Consistency is incredibly important.
The problem isn't that you're adding a feature, the problem is that you're adding a feature in an obtrusive way. Add as many features as you like (while preserving performance), but keep the day-to-day UI as stable as you possibly can. Place entry points (buttons) for new features in menus first, and make sure they're both used frequently and by many users before moving them to a crowded toolbar (and then give good thought about where it belongs on said toolbar/menu). Don't remove features unless they're truly problematic, and don't change UI.
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 here is probably a developer, or close to one, so they do not represent the needs of most people using computers.
Understanding the target audience for your product results in very different design decisions. Better is better might be great for products, but worse is better is probably better for systems that need to grow and evolve.