Sometimes, my Twitter feed coughs up some cool articles, like this one: "Performance comparison: counting words in Python, Go, C++, C, AWK, Forth, and Rust”
https://benhoyt.com/writings/count-words/ The Awk solution was by far the shortest by line count. Since the runtime for all the different solutions was a few seconds or less, Awk was probably the fastest because it took the least time to code. :D But there was a passage that made me laugh out loud: > Incidentally, this problem set the scene for a wizard duel > between two computer scientists several decades ago. In > 1986, Jon Bentley asked Donald Knuth to show off “literate > programming” with a solution to this problem, and he > came up with an exquisite, ten-page Knuthian masterpiece. > Then Doug McIlroy (the inventor of Unix pipelines) replied > with a one-liner Unix shell version using tr, sort, and uniq. I can imagine the shell pipeline also look less time to type in and run than it did to code the literate programming solution. For one-off things like this, less code is better. Then there was the article “Taco Bell Programming” http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2010/10/taco-bell-programming.html There were several good takeaways in this one, but my favorite line was “functionality is an asset, but code is a liability.” Not to mention the casual comment that xargs supports parallel processing (something I was totally unaware of!). — Larry