alt Hacker NewsOne interview question I like that's simpler and more applicable is to code a function that outputs the frequency count of each word in a string of text. Bonus for outputting the count in most to least order.
One interview question I like that's simpler and more applicable is to code a function that outputs the frequency count of each word in a string of text. Bonus for outputting the count in most to least order.
Is that really a "more applicable" task that finding the median? Are there actually software development jobs where either of those tasks are a regular/common part of the work, where people don't "just know" how to do them using whatever tools the job already uses?
I'm guessing I'd flunk your interview, because my initial response would be something like "No, I wouldn't write code for that. Unless there are unstated requirements, I'll just reach for the simplest possible solution, which for me would be something like cat textfile | tr ' ' '\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r That doesn't handle punctuation, probably doesn't handle unicode the way you might expect, and has a bunch of other things that additional requirements might rule out. But that'd be my starting point."