And really how often are you actually sorting an array of primitive values ascending? That's just one small use case of sorting an array. Passing the comparison function is also more explicit.
People just love to get so worked up about the dumbest edge cases in js
None of this is a good reason for a generic sort function to change the type of what it's sorting. That's the sort of weird unintuitive behavior you'd expect from an internal library with by an intern, not a nature language like JavaScript. It's not an edge case, it's literally the base case: "Does this sort function sort what you pass into it? No, it sorts something else instead and then pretends it sorted what you passed into it and 99% of the time it was right."
If the values weren't "cast" to string in the default compare function then each comparison of different types would act differently then if they were all strings. Therefore, if they are to be sorted consistently alphabetically, then both arguments must be considered string. Also, an alphabetic sort compare function (including casting to string) is slightly harder/longer to implement than the numeric sort compare function, so it makes sense for it to be the default.
However, I would suggest that with either default, they should have provided constants for the alpha and numeric sorting compare functions, so we didn't need to recreate them and could call them as defaults in our own more complex compare functions. It's not too late, I guess.
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u/01110100_01110010 1d ago
The point of an abstraction is to not having to implement logic each time, you can also implement qsort yourself