Nice article. There's been a lot of ink spilled about the word histogram problem and the Unix/McIlroy solution vs. Knuth's solution, e.g.: http://www.leancrew

Nice article. There's been a lot of ink spilled about the word histogram problem and the Unix/McIlroy solution vs. Knuth's solution, e.g.: http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg/ http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg... I always liked McIlroy's solution because it's shorter. But it bugged me that in theory it was O(n log n) and not O(n). But this post gives some good evidence that this doesn't matter for problems of most practical sizes. And I've actually used McIlroy's solution in practice and I've never found speed to be an issue. Of course it's sorting variable length strings rather than fixed-length records, so there's probably some subtlety. But I like this article because it tests your assumptions.