it's still important to instill those concepts so that when you get to the more difficult, complicated real world problems, those concerns are on your mind.

It's a trivial problem with no real implications outside the kata world. I think the servers will survive a little extra work... 1000 runs with this algorithm clocks in at 0.035s. Yours takes 0.023s less ;)

You’re every iteration making chars.sort for word. I think, it’s not good idea, because for every word in array (per iteration) - have sense to do this… But for incoming word (from params of method), - better - make word.chars.sort just once!