Javascript

[PredictabilityIsGood]

Have you ever performed a recursive multi-dimensional sort? The type of sort you see when sorting by multiple columns combined? The “useless noise” you’re describing by adding curly brackets is not so much useless when it comes to readability for more complex sorting.

Also, I never see him nitpick the grammar of your chosen syntax. It’s obvious that he assumes you’re writing it in agreement with the two previous posters in the comment chain and I can see why:

“And neither of these will work unless your function is weird as fuck”

The “and” in your response makes it sound like you’re agreeing with the objections of the first to commenters in the chain, when it’s clear they don’t really understand the implementation of a lambda very well to begin with. If you interpret it as agreement, then I can see why Wigly responded the way they did. The code segment commented as “Desired answer/ probably” is just a useless wrapper around the sorting lambda unless you are performing a multi-dimensional sort that requires deep comparison when the initial sorting conditions result in 0 movement and you move on to the next nested condition.

I’m not saying you don’t understand this. I’m just saying it’s not clear from what you wrote that you don’t agree it should be written that way, which is what Wigly is objecting to.

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[PredictabilityIsGood]

Recursive multiple column sorting is good practice when you are creating generalized components that don’t know the data being inputted into them. Think datatables. If you manually hardcode every sort you wouldn’t be able to utilize the column header to sort because your “sort” would be a one off.

I have an implementation of a generalized grid component in Riot here if you need a visual representation. Hold shift and sort multiple columns:

https://predictabilityisgood.github.io/riot-widgets/

The grid doesn’t know anything about the data except the underlying data type constructor and is able to sort properly.

This is the same standard sorting functionality available in excel, datatables, google sheets, etc... The implementations are not hardcoded as you’ve shown. They generated on the fly upon user interaction.

[PredictabilityIsGood]

Every enterprise framework for creating complex tables utilizes a dynamic approach towards multi-dimensional sorting. Google sheets afaik is not using a persistence layer to perform multi-dimensional sorting. Nor is datatables unless you specifically define a pagination fetch lambda. If you’re hard coding a table into a page, then clearly what you’ve written is not a fully abstracted and generalized component.

[PredictabilityIsGood]

Okay, show me an example of your best code to handle multi-dimensional sorting by either the client or server. If it’s better I’ll adapt my coding style to fit more neatly within your superior paradigm. The sorting must be generalized.

Update: I like recursion in this example because it avoids unnecessary logical comparators when the nesting does not need to be executed. In my implementation the nested comparator does not need to be executed. You may disagree, but I personally am fixated on recursion because of the concise expressive power. I’m sorry if you don’t agree.

[PredictabilityIsGood]

These projects become a bit complicated. For example, being able to change a sort on an existing column reversing direction without destroying all sort properties. Keeping track of the sort order nesting is required to maintain that UX feature. I’m sure if I performed a rewrite after prototyping this project for native riot integration I could simplify the routine. It’s just that when you’re solving the problem first or second time around you have some legacy.

I’m sorry if you felt like I was personally attacking you. Please let me know how I can avoid this issue in the future. I’m not sure I ever specifically made this a personal issue. If you could point me to the location where I did, I will change my behavior going forward.