[buserror]

I so totally agree! Forgetting stuff is as important as learning new one, because it forces you to learn/re-learn quickly.

I wrote millions and millions of lines of code in my 30 years career, I was once a top shot mac developer, and I was once a top shot computer geometry expert, and an OpenGL expert and all of that, and I've forgotten most of it... If someone asked me a trick question, I'd look like a fool.

Simply because I don't need it. My strength over all these years is my capacity at learning stuff quickly, and that doesn't come up in a trick-question interview.

So for these data structures questions: In 30 years I once had to implement a binary tree for any sort of problem I had in my job. Now it's not the same for hashes, lists, queues and many others, but trees? Quite frankly it's a CS toy. You know it's on the shelf in case it's needed, but it very rarely get a dusting.