alt Hacker NewsIs 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."
That's a good solution using existing tools, but I usually want it solved in whatever programming language is being tested. Not because command line tools aren't often an underutilized solution but because I am looking for their tendencies. Do they reach for a hashmap? Can they calculate it all in one pass? That kind of thing.
As for the why, it covers a class of issue that does come up; counting like items. Determining the frequency of things is pretty common. I run into variations on the problem a lot, even if word counting is a contrived example.
It also gives a good look at how someone might solve the "like" items - things like punctuation, casefolding, etc... - messing around with strings is something that happens all the time in the real world.
Also I might be tempted dock your shell solution for using cat unnecessarily
tr ' ' '\n' < textfile | sort | uniq -c | sort -r
Or even:
< textfile tr ' ' '\n' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r