I’ll have to think about how to get this major point across more effectively, because I don’t seem to have done so yet.

I'm not sure you'll be able to. And this isn't a slam against BrowserUk: for the most part, I'm in agreement with him. What you're successfully doing is showing where the naive (notice only one dot above the i here - I doubt anyone is confused as to what word that is) sort is insufficient. What you're unsuccessfully doing is showing where, for 95%+ (I suspect BrowserUk to be close to accurate with his 1-2% estimate where your details become important) of the time, I should still care. In my ~16 years of paid programming work, I have not yet encountered a time where a naive sort is insufficient for the work at hand. Now, granted, the first ~2 years was as a student, and those companies produced English-only output, and no names were involved, so 7-bit ascii was more than sufficient. For the last 14 years, I've worked in I18N/L10N-enabled software, though, and it still doesn't come up. Sorting doesn't come up often, but, thus far, the locale-sensitive order has been overkill. (Another team on the same product has integrated ICU for doing sorting where it matters, but that's something like 3 or 4 developers out of a team of 300, right in that 1-2% pocket that BrowserUk mentioned.)

Obviously, locale-sensitive ordering is a passion of yours. Where it seems to me that you're failing to come across (and I can't speak for whether this would get BrowserUk or anyone else to your side or not, I can only speak for myself) is that you're speaking from your perspective, not mine. That can be a Hard Thing™ to do. When is it, in the other 90%+, that I should care about locale-based collation? I mean, I'm glad there's a module that handles 90%+ of the cases where I do care about locale sensitive collation, but if I only need that 2% of the time, I'm not going to incur the overhead of figuring out what, if any, parameters need to be passed in to Unicode::Collate's constructor, or the runtime overhead, for the other 98% (I assume that if the naive sort is sufficient that U::C's constructor doesn't need any parameters, though I don't know that yet).

Hope that helps.

Update: I suppose it didn't help. Ah well, people who don't respond in good faith don't seem to want responses, so I'll just leave it at this.

In reply to Re^6: best sort by Tanktalus
in thread best sort by ag4ve

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