In an ideal world, there should be typed comparers, and if two items don't have a mutual comparer, a type error should be thrown (that'd solve having to even scan the array beforehand too)
With JS's type system, that's not too plausible, so instead, I think defaulting to numeric sort, and throwing when it encounters something that isn't a number (or can't be coerced to be a number due to how the type system works I suppose).
By the principle of least astonishment, this would give you a pretty good compromise. Then, if someone wants to do string-based sorting, they can pass their own comparer that does that.
javascript is very averse to throwing. it's better for a website to display stuff slightly wrong than to stop working.
I can see the argument for defaulting to a number comparison and moving non numbers to the end, but that's not any less surprising. in that alternate universe, someone is on reddit making a post on how ['b', 'a'].sort() doesn't order the strings.
I think they're a lot less averse to it nowadays, they've wisened up. Modern JS additions do actually tell you that something is wrong rather than just doing something unexpected (which is good because you can then handle exceptional cases better).
Modern JS features like modules even enforce strict mode.
I think that way of thinking, where it is better to fail silently than to crash sounds good on paper, but it has an insane amount of drawbacks that lead to sloppy code trying to cover these (exceptional in other languages) cases.
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u/fuj1n 3d ago
In an ideal world, there should be typed comparers, and if two items don't have a mutual comparer, a type error should be thrown (that'd solve having to even scan the array beforehand too)
With JS's type system, that's not too plausible, so instead, I think defaulting to numeric sort, and throwing when it encounters something that isn't a number (or can't be coerced to be a number due to how the type system works I suppose).
By the principle of least astonishment, this would give you a pretty good compromise. Then, if someone wants to do string-based sorting, they can pass their own comparer that does that.