If you want to compare memory efficiency. The sort+uniq -c would likely be more optimal in a high level language as you would there keep only the count+value i

If you want to compare memory efficiency. The sort+uniq -c would likely be more optimal in a high level language as you would there keep only the count+value in a defaultdict or alike instead of sorting the entire dataset, which requires keeping it all in mem. As for brevity, yeah, this particular example would require 5 lines instead of 1.