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230 points craigkerstiens | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.522s | source
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kingkilr ◴[] No.42576212[source]
I would strongly implore people not to follow the example this post suggests, and write code that relies on this monotonicity.

The reason for this is simple: the documentation doesn't promise this property. Moreover, even if it did, the RFC for UUIDv7 doesn't promise this property. If you decide to depend on it, you're setting yourself up for a bad time when PostgreSQL decides to change their implementation strategy, or you move to a different database.

Further, the stated motivations for this, to slightly simplify testing code, are massively under-motivating. Saving a single line of code can hardly be said to be worth it, but even if it were, this is a problem far better solved by simply writing a function that will both generate the objects and sort them.

As a profession, I strongly feel we need to do a better job orienting ourselves to the reality that our code has a tendency to live for a long time, and we need to optimize not for "how quickly can I type it", but "what will this code cost over its lifetime".

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peterldowns ◴[] No.42576272[source]
The test should do a set comparison, not an ordered list comparison, if it wants to check that the same 5 accounts were returned by the API. I think it's as simple as that.

The blogpost is interesting and I appreciated learning the details of how the UUIDv7 implementation works.

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1. vips7L ◴[] No.42576341[source]
Don’t you think that depends on what you’re guaranteeing in your api? If you’re guaranteeing that your api returns the accounts ordered you need to test for that. But I do agree in general that using a set is the correct move.
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2. Too ◴[] No.42576711[source]
The test is a very strange example indeed. Is it testing the backend, the database or both? If the api was guaranteeing ordered values, pre-uuid7 the backend must have sorted them by other means before returning, making the test identical. If the backend is not guaranteeing order, that shouldn't be tested either.