HackerRank Birthday Cake Candles challenge

HackerRank has a challenge for calculating which birthday candles get blown out.

My C# solution looked particularly elegant to me, so I thought I'd show it here:

public static int birthdayCakeCandles(List<int> candles)
{
        var maxHeight = candles.Max();
        var numOfCandles = candles.Count(c => c == maxHeight);
        return numOfCandles;
}

Comments

[Pierre Bouillon]

Hey @tandu-dev, nice solution, thanks for sharing!

I wonder if using the GroupBy would have save some iterations here

public static int birthdayCakeCandles(List<int> candles)
    => candles
        .GroupBy(x => x)
        .OrderByDescending(x => x.Key)
        .First()
        .Count();

A dictionary might also be a good fit for such a problem!

[tandu-dev]

That's definitely a workable solution? Could you go into it a little more? I'm familiar with the => notation for Linq, but haven't seen it used with the method this way. Is this more functional programming?

[Pierre Bouillon]

Kind of, those are just syntactic sugar, it is a body expression 😄