Of course, *both* solutions are inadequate when you consider languages other than English <https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/38070> (especially agglutinative languages like Hungarian and Turkish). For example, how many "words" are in " *muvaffakiyetsizleştiriciveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine"…?*
Pedantry aside, good find! Next time I'm asked how Troff differs philosophically from TeX, I'll cite this article as a condensed example. On Fri, 26 Mar 2021 at 13:31, Larry Kollar <kol...@windstream.net> wrote: > 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 >
