[chongli]

>That's not necessary. You can just create a type that embeds the type you're sorting

But that's more work (and more boilerplate) than simply passing an anonymous comparator to the sort function.

[cmccabe]

Let me guess. You are coming from Java. In Java this would be:

  myArray.sort(new Comparator<MyClass> ({
    @Override
    CompareTo(MyClass lhs, MyClass rhs) {
      return rhs.compare(lhs);
    }
  }));

Is that really shorter? I don't think so.

In any case, there is a more elegant solution in Go, which is simply:

  sort.Sort(sort.Reverse(array))

You need to open your mind a little bit, to learn a new language.

[chongli]

You are coming from Java.

Nope. Clojure and Haskell. Clojure:

    user=> (sort > (vals {:foo 5, :bar 2, :baz 10}))
    (10 5 2)

Haskell:

    >>> sortBy (flip compare) . map snd $ [("foo", 5), ("bar", 2), ("baz", 10)]
    [10,5,2]