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Comment by Certhas | Hacker News Reader

Agreed.What's more, the idea that people learn to put leading zeros is wrong and impractical, unless you know in advance how many digits you need. When you go from version 5.9.17 to 5.10.0 you don't go back and relabel every existing folder as 5.09.17.

The today standard way of sorting is well defined, unambiguous, and natural. Lexographic has its place, but user facing interfaces ain't it.

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Had this in the Beat Saber mod manager recently. The game released 1.40.10 and my mod manager suddenly thought that game went backwards from 1.40.9

I had a similar fun problem with a little tool for use with an ATSC TV tuner.

For context, while NTSC program selections were typically indexed by channel ("ABC here is channel 4, NBC is channel 6"), ATSC uses "subchannels" like "12.1" or "21.5". I had assumed these could be safely stored as a decimal type.

Then one of the broadcasters here introduced both "42.1" and "42.10" and it broke the key model in the underlying SQLite database I kept the channel info in.

Just no

User interfaces that try to be cleaver are a pita.

Keep it simple, and avoid the confusion with corner cases that otherwise will baffle users. Like this

Lexicographic order is great when you need an unambiguous criterion that will work the same in every implementation; but you only need that for automated processing, i.e. for coding.

For user-facing presentation, having 5.9.xxx before 5.10.xxx is simpler; the corner case that baffles users is having 5.1 and 5.10 before 5.2.

Some (most) systems will sort 5.9 after 5.10 though, so if the user is baffled they'll need to learn it anyway. Adding a second way to do it kinda makes things worse

LOL I can tell you don't have the experience of designing UI and shipping product to end users

> Keep it simple

What's simple? Good defaults make things simple, which means putting 9 before 10 in case, for the reason explained by parent.

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