Richard Ishida avatar Richard Ishida

How to sort the list of languages?

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When asked about how to sort languages for the W3C site redesign, Richard made a great detailed answer, with a nice focus on user needs:

Sorting by most-often-used language is mostly basing the decision on our view of the world, rather than the user's needs.
The issue at hand is rather how to help the individual user locate their language as painlessly as possible, and with the minimal amount of implied bias.
I don't think it should be an exercise in classification. We should look for a way of ordering items that implies no bias, and is predictable.