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
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.
That's the thing; not everything has to be or should be monetized. The thing I miss the most are the funny dumb amateur videos.
There are several YouTube channels I love; Folding Ideas, hbomberguy, Kurtis Conner, Contrapoints, etc... but I see those essentially as semi professional / professional variations on television. Once I got into their content via YouTube, YouTube of course drove me away with horrid vile ads, and I moved on to supporting those creators on Patreon.
And that's all good - the digital medium needs places like YouTube. But that doesn't mean there isn't a huge amount of value in the amateur unmonitized video landscape. Pairing those with some niche phpbb style forums was, for me, the last time I truly enjoyed the experience of actually being on the internet.
It's funny you mention Toyota, my Dad's 2022 Civic Hybrid is the one I get to witness being buggy garbage pretty much non-stop with CarPlay. Lord don't plug it into the USB port that does data if you're already on wireless Carplay. You might be done until you pull over. I also love the way using speech to reply to a text often resumes the wrong song (seemingly just starts a random song midway through, and multiple times the Joe Rogan Podcast which dad doesn't listen to and is not subscribed to - when this happens it always starts at the same point in the intro).
I don't actually know if the Toyota infotainment setup is to blame though. Since I've never encountered a reasonably stable, glitch free Carplay experience in the last 5 years, I've always just figured "that must be how CarPlay is". I have never owned an iPhone so I only get the cliffnotes version of the experience. But since it's got a 0% track record in that limited viewing, I'm either unlucky, emit magical anti-apple em waves, or am possessed by the soul of Steve Jobs favourite black shirt.
I don't know if the sensitivity to Siri can be turned down, again not an iPhone guy myself, but it bugs me how often we will be talking and suddenly the audio stops and Siri says "I don't know how to help you with that" or something similar. Sometimes we just don't talk so that we don't constantly have Siri interrupting Hardcore History.
I have the Nothing Phone 3a now, before that, I had all flagship pixels. 0 were not slow. I always figured it had to do with the infotainment centers implementation of the protocols or simply their hardware.
It was always stable for me, just sluggish.
If I had to pick I'd take sluggish over constantly buggy of course. So props there.
The infotainment setup on my Tesla though is golden with only the occasional quirk. After using that, Carplay and Android Auto feel very regressive. A guy I work with has an R2 so I got to tinker with it and I figured it would be comparable but it actually kinda sucked.
Are there vehicles that support it in a way that isn't buggy? I have a few friends with it and I don't think I've been on a single ride with them without a glitch. Freezing interface, spontaneously jumping to regular Bluetooth, music playing but no actual volume, plugging into usb power causing some kind of mode-shift that makes the screen hang or briefly cease to work, all kinds of nonsense. Also kind of weirdly bad interface I feel (very subjective opinion there, obviously that's not a "fact").
I've only had Android Auto in my own vehicles, and while it hasn't been as buggy, it feels slow. I never use it anymore.
People often forget how good tablet and mobile datepickers have gotten as well. They may not match your sites weird style exactly, but they'll feel native and handle lots of things like ADA compliance that your crappy custom one likely won't.
"you're" here referring to higher ups not you personally
1. Locality of behavior - the classes are the description of the style once you know tailwind, and they live where the thing they're styling is. I can look at a template and know pretty well how it is going to look without having to go lookup a sites personal bespoke CSS and match what's written there to the markup.
2. It's the same classes as you move from project to project. I have tons of small one-off apps I maintain, all using tailwind and I don't have to figure out the custom CSS classes and their meanings. It is a knowledge set that reduces friction between projects and I really need things that reduce cognitive load like that.
3. No dead CSS. There are tools to help with this in regular CSS but I just don't have to think about it with tailwind and that's nice. I work on my templates and the CSS is updated and minifed on the fly without extra steps (or unnecessary CSS).
4. Easy to build a personal component library that doesn't also require relevant CSS to be bundles with it. For me this one is pretty great. Thanks to template engines (for me it's Django's, but Jinja or others are grand too) I have a simple place to pull components (really just template partials) and widgets I've made and they just work because the underlying classes are the same. There are some exceptions around color schemes and the like but now all my little components take a colour scheme arg and voila, no proballo.
I think the key here is that a description of the visual is embedded in the markup. That lets the actual mark-up delivered to the front-end describe pretty much the whole kit. With server-side rendering ( I use HTMX ) I can even write unittests that responses contain expected markup, including CSS classes (I built a few helper assertions that all of my test suites use) which gives me some interesting checks.
I really ultimately don't think there is one correct way to do things. The things I value may be utterly irrelevant to another developer.
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