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Comment by ceautery | Hacker News Reader

"JavaScript is horrible."

  > function byNum(a,b) {return +a>+b}
    undefined
  > [5, 10, 1].sort(byNum)
    [1, 5, 10]

No, it's not.

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Except it is, because your code doesn't work:

  > [10, 1, 5, 1, 10, 10, 1, 5, 5, 5, 10].sort(byNum)
  > [10, 10, 5, 1, 10, 1, 1, 5, 5, 5, 10]

The right way is

  > function byNum(a, b) { return a - b; }

A bug in my code doesn't make javascript horrible, it makes me horrible for rushing to illustrate a point instead of just harrumphing internally and finishing my coffee.

Good catch.

Writing your own method to solve a problem every other language does out of the box is missing the point...

True, JS doesn't ship with a large standard library. But that has turned out to be one of its greatest strengths and a key reason for it's runaway success.

> runaway

See "runaway chain reaction".

I'm not following, is this just snark or am I missing a point?

The point is not that it's impossible to numerically sort an array of numbers in JavaScript; it's that calling the sort function on such an array doesn't do that. That's a surprise to most developers, I'm sure, and surprises in languages and libraries are bad.

that looks pretty horrible if you ask me

It can (and should!) be written more elegantly

[5, 10, 1].sort(function(a, b) { return a - b })

Or, in ES6:

[5, 10, 1].sort((a, b) => { a - b })

That's starting to look pretty nice if you ask me.

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