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Comment by luckylion | Hacker News Reader

> Obviously reliable sorting is important, which is why people are upset that python's glob() turned out to be unreliable

A quick glance at the documentation didn't mention it, does glob even promise sorting the result? Relying on that to happen when it's not even promised seems negligent.

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I mean, I have learned that people simply won't accept that SQL doesn't guarantee the order of a result set if you don't use "order by". I tried to argue it and eventually gave up. It seems vastly easier to change a language than human nature. People are hardwired to ignore claims that something should not be relied on, because in normal human relations, that is a way of pushing away undue responsibility, not something to be taken literally.

> A quick glance at the documentation didn't mention it

What do you mean? It is the very first sentence of the documentation: "results are returned in arbitrary order"

https://docs.python.org/2/library/glob.html

Ah, see, I missed that, I had just skimmed, then grepped for "sort" and "order" (but mistyped that as oder).

Most developers look at the result from a function call rather than looking at the documentation.

It doesn't sort. But people assume it does especially if the files are returned in the order that they were created, which typically will be sorted.

I think this is why it doesn't get noticed; the files are written say

   result-20190901-1303
   result-20190901-1305
   result-20190901-1310
   etc...

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