>I can't think of many real world uses where counting the frequency of words would matter to most businesses. The idea is that it's the simple "hello world" of

>I can't think of many real world uses where counting the frequency of words would matter to most businesses. The idea is that it's the simple "hello world" of teaching mapreduce. Likewise for teaching new programming language syntax, the idea of literally displaying the phrase "hello world" is not useful for explaining more real world business uses. Since everybody presumably already knows what "hello world" means, they can ignore that string and instead, pay attention to the surrounding syntax (printf, WriteLine, println, puts, echo, etc) of whatever new programming language they're trying to learn. Since counting words is very easy to do without mapreduce (using dictionaries or associative arrays) and it also doesn't require any particular business domain knowledge, people can ignore it and just concentrate on the structure of setting up mapreduce. In that context, the "uselessness" of counting word frequencies makes it easier to isolate the learning of mapreduce.