Well I've set myself a task.
I have a text file containing a list of stock items
each line contains the number in stock followed by a tab followed by the
name of the item. I need to implement something that reads in the text
file and outputs the stock list in ascending or descending order of
quantity.

Please note I am NOT asking for solutions.

In bash this is laughably trivial

sort -nr $1 | head -${2:-10}

Java is easy but long winded and takes a while to set up

C is ... well it's been a while but I'll get there

Python, well that's my current task. It will be interesting to compare
the solutions for speed and ease of development and more importantly
re-usability.