Word frequency using JEQL

Ryan Tomayko has a post on how Ruby recapitulates AWK (or to be more biologically accurate, how it carries vestigial traits which reveal its evolutionary lineage from AWK down through Perl).

He gives an example of how curl, AWK, and sort can be chained together to compute word counts for Swift's A Modest Proposal:

curl -s http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1080/1080.txt |
ruby -ne '
  BEGIN { $words = Hash.new(0) }

  $_.split(/[^a-zA-Z]+/).each { |word| $words[word.downcase] += 1 }

  END {
    $words.each { |word, i| printf "%3d %s\n", i, word }
  }
' |
sort -rn

Back in the day I was an enthusiastic user of AWK.  I was happy to discover that  JEQL can be handily used for similar kinds of text processing, when equipped with suitable string handling and RegEx functions. Here's the word count functionality in JEQL (using a source for the text that is more bot-friendly than Project Gutenberg):

TextReader t file: 
  "http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/swift/modest.html";

t = select String.toLowerCase(splitValue) word from t 
      split by RegEx.splitByMatch(line, "[a-zA-Z]+" );

Print select word, count(*) cnt from t 
        group by word order by cnt desc; 

AWK had a bit of a rep for being somewhat write-only.  To my SQL-attuned eyes the JEQL version is more understandable.