In the early computing era there was a competition. Something like take some input and produce an output. One programmer made a large program in (IIRC) Fortran with complex specifications documentation etc. The other used shell pipes, sort, and a small handful or two of other programs in a pipeline to accomplish the same task in like 10 developer min.
http://catb.org/~esr/writings/unix-koans/ten-thousand.html
"""“And who better understands the Unix-nature?” Master Foo asked. “Is it he who writes the ten thousand lines, or he who, perceiving the emptiness of the task, gains merit by not coding?”"""
[1] https://homepages.cwi.nl/~storm/teaching/reader/BentleyEtAl8... [2] https://www.google.com/search?q=knuth+vs+mcilroy
I'm trying to copy-in the program as it might have existed, with some obvious updates to work in today's shells ...
#!/bin/sh
tr -cs A-Za-z '
' "${2:-/dev/stdin}" |\
tr A-Z a-z |\
sort |\
uniq -c |\
sort -rn |\
sed ${1:-100}q
Edited: Removed some errors likely induced by OCR / me not catching that in the initial transcription from the browser view of the file.
[For those who may not follow all the links: Bentley asked Knuth to write a program in Pascal (WEB) to illustrate literate programming—i.e. explaining a long complicated program—and so Knuth wrote a beautiful program with a custom data structure (hash-packed tries). Bentley then asked McIlroy to review the program. In the second half of the review, McIlroy (the inventor of Unix pipes) questioned the problem itself (the idea of writing a program for scratch), and used the opportunity to evangelize Unix and Unix pipes (at the time not widely known or available).]
I drank from the OO koolaid at one point. I was really into building things up using OOD and creating extensible, flexible code to accomplish everything.
And when I showed some code I'd written to my brother, he (rightly) scoffed and said that should have been 2-3 lines of shell script.
And I was enlightened. ;)
Like, I seriously rebuilt my programming philosophy practically from the ground up after that one comment. It's cool having a really smart brother, even if he's younger than me. :)