[andrewprock]

It saddens me to think that alphabetization is going the way of the dodo. It was a gateway drug into computer science for me.

[jaccarmac]

Could you elaborate? Feels like a fun riff, even if it's just about string-sorting algorithms.

[andrewprock]

There's not much to elaborate, tons of practical use cases for search, sort and storage rely on alphabetization. If you move through an analog world of organized data, you'll find and develop many practical approaches to interacting with data based on knowing the key and the alphabetic ordering. Whether it's a phone book, a map, a dictionary, or filing systems, alphabets were always used as an indexing mechanism.