Ok, you've convinced me on the naming -- sortBy isn't a part of the standard Scala API that I use a lot, but it is precedent and we do try to match the API in Spark, so you did the right thing and my criticism was off target.  But @marmbrus is correct in https://github.com/apache/incubator-spark/pull/509 that we should avoid using view bounds, so the signature should be either
```scala
def sortBy[K](f: (T) ⇒ K)(implicit ord: Ordering[K]): RDD[T]
```
or
```scala
def sortBy[K: Ordering](f: (T) ⇒ K): RDD[T]
```
The two are functionally equivalent (the second desugars to the first except for the name of the implicit parameter), but I prefer the type-class style that leaves the implicit parameter, well, more implicit.