When practicing solving algorithm problems, we often see questions that make us wonder if we would ever encounter similar situations in the real world (e.g. spiral traversal of a matrix).

This time, however, I came across an interesting algorithm challenge that makes practical sense to me.

Here’s the task:

You are given a list of tasks, some of which depend on others.

Write a function tasksInOrder that takes a subset of those tasks and returns an ordered list of all the tasks to run.

To illustrate:

const tasks = [
  {
  task: "make a sandwich",
  depends: [ "buy groceries" ]
  },
  {
  task: "buy groceries",
  depends: [ "go to the store" ]
  }, 
  {
  task: "go to the store",
  depends: []
  }
]
// tasksInOrder(tasks, ["make a sandwich"])
// -> [ 'go to the store', 'buy groceries', 'make a sandwich' ]
// tasksInOrder(tasks, ["buy groceries", "make a sandwich"])
// -> [ 'go to the store', 'buy groceries', 'make a sandwich' ]

We all make to-do lists in our daily lives, so I was glad to finally see a function that we can actually put to good, practical use.

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