I'm in the process of interviewing with a small, Java-centric tech company. They recently asked me to solve a programming problem in Java. The problem involved reading input, calculating a case-insensitive word count, and then outputting the details of the word count. My Perl solution looked like this: 
#!/usr/bin/perl

%words = ();

while ( <STDIN> ) {
    chomp;
    $words{ lc( $_ ) } ++;
}

foreach my $word ( sort keys %words ) {
    print "$word;$words{ $word }\n";
}

[download]
My Java equivalent had 5x the lines and 10x the characters. I submitted both solutions, pointing out that the problem was much more suited for Perl than Java. I have my second interview next Monday. :-)

In reply to Perl Destroys Interview Question by redsquirrel

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