Of course sort is wasteful of processing cycles, but what are we trying to conserve? These are web pages, it's 2002, we have RAM and MHz to spare. The poster is just satisfying his curiosity about finding long words ( and doing it in minimum keystrokes ), it's not meant to be an enterprise application.

I agree that klugey code is bad, and we should all be aware of scaling / performance issues, but sometimes I think we can be needlessly Puritan about it.