[jhayward]

I was going to roll my eyes about stuff no one will ever hear of, much less use in their day job, but there are some really relevant structures here. Finger trees, cache-oblivious structures, R-trees, etc., just to name a couple from a random page or two. The "why they're worth studying" summaries are gold.

Thanks!

[bhaavan]

A doctor has to mostly always treat common cold, and influenza. But that's no excuse for her / him to not know the purpose of the left pulmonary vein. The more basics they know, the better doctors they are. Sorry if this analogy is a bit extreme, but I want to make a point.

[jhayward]

I think a more apt analogy would be if you would disqualify doctors who don't know the nucleotide sequence of the genes that code for the cytochrome p450 enzyme process from treating your cold or flu.

The left pulmonary veins are gross anatomy, akin to knowing what an 'if' statement is. Knowing the current state of the art in determining a minimum complexity for an operation on an obscure tree implementation is deep domain knowledge used by only a few specialists.

[jwr]

> much less use in their day job

Yes, some are indeed very relevant. In one of my previous businesses, we built a search engine where we used DAWGs (Directed Acyclic Word Graphs) [I didn't do this part]. And they worked really, really well, in fact they work well to this day.

[nathell]

Good to hear they do. :)

[mcguire]

When was the last time you wrote a finger tree? At work?

[I'm just responding to your first clause. :-)]

[debatem1]

FM indices as well.