Sure. But are hundreds of dependencies really required for this?
In Java you would use tools like Guava or Spring for general quality of life improvements, and there would be a few deps for them (under a dozen iirc).
The solution is for the “top tier” libraries and frameworks in the JS world to be designed with minimal dependencies. And where they do have a need for a dependency, they undertake serious consideration of the best option that minimises dependency hell.
You are meant to pass an argument to [].sort; If you don't, it falls back to the most generic thing that makes sense -- which is turning everything into a string and sorting lexicographically.
Arrays in JS can have any type in them, such as [number, string, function]. That's obviously very unlikely, but the only thing in common between all types in JS is that they can all be explicitly turned into strings.
And yes, I agree that throwing an error here for no argument would be better here (a linter WILL enforce this), but this is hardly a critical shortcoming of JS's standard library, and you DEFINITELY do not need a utility library just to use the language (especially for your examples).
> [1, 2, 10, 3].sort()
[ 1, 10, 2, 3 ]
I suppose "critical" is debatable but this seems very fundamental and very unexpected to me.
> you DEFINITELY do not need a utility library just to use the language (especially for your examples)
I hadn't actually considered using a linter to avoid these types of standard library footguns... that's actually a pretty great idea!
But for example, they probably decided that it was more useful defaulting to having a sort order for things that otherwise aren't comparable:
a = [undefined, null, undefined, null]
a.sort()
// [ null, null, undefined, undefined ]
If you have an array that's a huge mix of random values, from null to undefined to [] to {} and you sort() it, all of those values will now be grouped together by type.
This doesn't seem like a bonkers trade-off.
I agree that without an argument it should just be a fatal error, but if it were to have any sort of functionality, it should convert all to strings.
This is consistent among JS's apis, and pretty much the origin of all the 'js wut' moments on the internet. Everything in JS can be converted into a string. If you do something stupid with disparate types, it will likely turn operands into strings and compare them that way.