Question

Are data structures like linked lists something that are purely academic for real programming or do you really use them? Are they things that are covered by generics so that you don’t need to build them (assuming your language has generics)? I’m not debating the importance of understanding what they are, just the usage of them outside of academia. I ask from a front end web, backend database perspective. I’m sure someone somewhere builds these. I’m asking from my context.

Thank you.

EDIT: Are Generics so that you don’t have to build linked lists and the like?

Answer 1

It will depend on the language and frameworks you’re using. Most modern languages and frameworks won’t make you reinvent these wheels. Instead, they’ll provide things like List<T> or HashTable.

EDIT:

We probably use linked lists all the time, but don’t realize it. We don’t have to write implementations of linked lists on our own, because the frameworks we use have already written them for us.

You may also be getting confused about “generics”. You may be referring to generic list classes like List<T>. This is just the same as the non-generic class List, but where the element is always of type T. It is probably implemented as a linked list, but we don’t have to care about that.

We also don’t have to worry about allocation of physical memory, or how interrupts work, or how to create a file system. We have operating systems to do that for us. But we may be taught that information in school just the same.