Re: Interesting articles

[John Gardner]

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 <kollar@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
>