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Comment by II2II | Hacker News Reader

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 no such thing as natural, and it is quite hard to determine what is more common. (Quite often more common is culturally dependent or, worse, contex dependent).

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So the argument is that because this doesn't solve the challenge of ordering all possible strings by semantic meaning it should not be used?

Even though it increases the match between semantic meaning and string sorting in many important cases and is a simple and consistent rule?

the one true way: budget_09.csv, budget_10.csv

Then `budget_100.csv` comes by and now you need to rename 99 files.

It’s been about two thousand years since the number of months in a year has been increased. I don’t think we’re getting 88 new ones anytime soon.

> It’s been about two thousand years since the number of months in a year has been increased.

What? What are you thinking of? The number of months in a year is always 12 or 13 in any calendar system because they start by reflecting the moon. If you mean the Christian calendar, it was fixed at 12 months to the year well over 2000 years ago. If you mean any calendar, it's probably been more like one year since the number of months in a year has been increased. 12 lunar months falls short of a solar year by about 11 days, so any given lunar calendar will generate an extra month about every three years, and there are lots of different lunar calendars.

(For example, the Chinese calendar occasionally repeats full months in order to keep the month of the year lined up with the season. Whenever this happens, there will be 13 months in the year, of which two share the same name.)

The ancient Romans claimed to have had a 10-month calendar [1], which is what I assume the reference is. Either that, or when month 6 got renamed August in honor of Emperor Augustus

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar#Legendary_10-mo...

> The ancient Romans claimed to have had a 10-month calendar [1], which is what I assume the reference is.

Well, in the first place (as you note), there is no reason to believe that claim - the ancient Romans never made such a claim, but the classical Romans made that claim about the ancient Romans - but more importantly even if it were true the months would have been added many centuries prior to "about two thousand years" ago. Nothing related to additional months happened two thousand years ago.

Sure, but if in this case the number would have only indicated the month you have an issue way earlier than 100 actually, you already have an issue on month 13 when you would go back got 01 and now you are overriding the old one.

Presumably there is a separate directory for every year.

And it's been about 25 years since we had to increase the number of digits for a year.

budget_97.csv, budget_98.csv, budget_99.csv, budget_2000.csv

Given that 09 and 10 refer to months, that wont ever gonna be a problem. And if you want to differentiate them years too, you can prefix with 2025- or put them in a 2025/, 2026/ etc folder.

Even better, I'd prefer to have more semantic meaning, and for budget-2025-09.csv, buget-2025-10.csv to work everywhere...

>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 no such thing as natural

Yeah, but there is such a thing as "give a predictable and consistent way I can name the files so that they sort as I want everywhere" which (if different OSes don't try to be "smart") would have been to prefix them with the numeric date zero padded.

Date is already in the metadata, it doesn't need to be in the filename.

Have you ever copied a file?

Yes, have you never edited the metadata? Also most filesystems these days preserve it when copied, e.g. my camera's EXFAT filesystem on an SD card gets the creation date preserved when I copy it to my PC or NAS, or between NAS & laptop later.

> Yes, have you never edited the metadata?

I don't even know what that means.

And just because some OS's copy the creation date doesn't mean all of them do. Specifically, the most popular desktop OS -- Windows -- doesn't.

(And it has nothing to do with your filesystem. It's your OS.)

>I don't even know what that means

Obviously something like:

  touch -t 202309271530 myfile.txt

And I'm supposed to do that manually for each of the couple hundred photos I copy...?

I'm sorry if I have a hard time taking that suggestion seriously.

>Yes, have you never edited the metadata?

Is your suggestion that people edit the metadata to get the sorting they want? madness...

Budget 2025-09.ods and Budget 2025-10.ods would sort reliably.

The options explode infinitely if you start trying to guess what people want in terms of semantic grouping. One user might want to see "September Budget" beside "September Sales Projections" and "September Calendar", and another might want to group it with "October Budget" and "November Budget".

If you have simple, stupid, but predictable tools, people can work around that, by picking naming conventions and even directory groupings that achieve what they want.

The worst is when you have an enforced sort that's not what you want. I think in Windows now, even if you say "Sort by name" in the Downloads directory, it insists on sub-grouping by age. I want every version of the Foobaz spec I downloaded, and no, I don't remember if all of them were in the last 3 months!

There is a simple criteria for ordering file names: treat sequences of characters as alphabetical, and sequences of digits as numbers.

It's easy to understand and predictable; it just happens to not be based on ASCII character codes, which is a legacy technology method only ever meaningful to US developers.

You can easily disable grouping in Windows Explorer.

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