Common misconception. See https://buttondown.email/hillelwayne/archive/donald-knuth-wa... ("Donald Knuth Was Framed") and discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22406070 (etc).
If your point is that the shell script isn't really the same thing as Knuth's program: sure, the approaches weren't algorithmically identical (assuming constant time insertions on average, Knuth's custom trie yields an O(N) solution, which is faster than McIlroy's O(N*log N) sort, though this point is moot if you use awk's hashtables to tally words rather than `sort | uniq -c`), but both approaches accomplish the exact same end result, and both fail to handle the exact same edge cases (e.g. accent marks).
And fortunately nobody is foolish enough to think that shell scripting is robust enough to use for more than one-off uses! /s
If instead of writing a full program as asked, he had given some cop-out like “actually, instead of writing this in WEB as you asked, I propose you just go to Bell Labs or some place where Unix is available, where it so happens that other people have written some programs like 'tr' and 'sort', then you can combine them in the following way”, that would have been an inappropriate reply, hardly worth publishing in the CACM column. (McIlroy, as reviewer, had the freedom to spend a section of his review advertising Unix and his invention of Unix pipelines, then not yet as well-known to the general CACM reader.)
So while of course shell one-liners are faster to bang out for a one-off use-case, they obviously cannot accomplish the task that was given (of demonstrating WEB). (BTW, I don't want to too much repeat the earlier discussion, but see https://codegolf.stackexchange.com/questions/188133/bentleys... — on that input, the best trie-based approach is 8x faster than awk and about 200x faster than the tr-sort script.)
Taking 10x longer doesn't seem like a language problem. If you don't know bash well you're going to take even longer to do it in bash than in python.
In any case the task you described is pretty much the same in python as in bash. At worst the python is going to be more more verbose.
python -c "print(len(set(w for l in list(open('test.txt')) for w in l.split())))"
tr ' ' '\n' < file_name | sort | uniq -c | wc -lIn Python you could use a generator but it would get a little more complicated and you'd still have to add all the words to set() but hopefully the number of different words is not that great.
The trie approach is quite memory efficient and that can matter.
I think you can just omit it but yeah...