alt Hacker News> There's no native Unix equivalent to frequencies, this sort | uniq -c is the closest we can get. Not only is it less performant (it has to collect the full input into memory before continuing), but it ties aggregation to ordering.
One of the core features of the Unix command-line is that it is user-extensible. If there's no "native" command equivalent to frequencies, you can write your own, and it will be given the same first-class treatment as any other binary in your PATH. This is entirely in keeping with the Unix philosophy of simple implementations.
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I imagine just ask would be enough for most usecases:
awk '{ freq[$0] += 1 } END { for (n in freq ){ print freq[n] " " n } }' < file.txt
That is nothing special about UNIX, every other OS with command line experience, or REPL windows, has similar capabilities.
This was my thought, too. Either you can extend your toolkit—make a utility like dedup (https://codeberg.org/napcakes/dedup) and put in on your path (yay! so easy)—or you can't and thus must define the boundary of the allowed toolkit. In this case, it seems overly disingenuous to not allow awk, which will do the thing for you just fine, no Clojure needed at all. awk is hashmaps galore.
Honestly, so much of our conceptions of "what's wrong" is more to do with lack of familiarity with history than any actually unsolved problem.
Yeah, that point was weak. The argument went from "Unix pipelines are not simple" to "unix based operating systems don't have an equivalent to Clojure's frequency function by default so it's worse"
OK but how would it look like if you had such a program? Shells are not known for having the extensive set of functions that real programming languages have.