Off By One

It’s fitting that the quote on my homepage’s title bar, as I started to post this, was “Against stupidity the very gods themselves contend in vain”.

People who know me know well that I’m a geek, and as such I have many of the canonical traits that define ‘geek’. I’m oriented towards strict, quantitative judgments and I prefer things that fit neatly into categories.

I’d like to show you two lists, as seen on a site called Coding Horror:

Now, I ask you: Which of those two seems like a better approach to the problem of sorting lists?

Here’s the thing, now that you’ve answered the question. The comments on the post that advocated the same sorting approach that I’m sure you picked were… distressing to me as a software developer who is concerned with human factors and real-world usability. Comments like this:

This attitude is the very worst of my profession, and to everyone that has ever seen a list sorted like column ‘A’, above, I apologize on behalf of the nerds that did the work, who to this day probably still think that you’re wrong.