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by photonbeam 1208 days ago
Most of us havent touched a tree structure since college, because there are other, real, problems out there. Trying to remember, or rederive it from scratch is slower and error-prone and bad for interviews
3 comments

You are just ignorant and naive.

Tree structure ? json, xml, protobuf, classes, functional programming, databases with foreign key, database internals, etc ?

Oh I forgot you also serialize and deserialize data - did you forget how that works ? Tree traversal again.

Do you know how organizationl hierarchy is structure ? It's a tree.

Do you know various maps and their usages ? We use them daily - it's very very important to know their internals. Hashing vs Trees vs Linked hash vs etc.

Google maps ? n-d trees ? Comparing data - merkel trees ? etc.

Every dev out there has common work with mine. But you won't be able to solve the problems that I face on a daily basis without thinking hard & without this dsa + concurrency knowledge.

Now, is it reasonable to ask these questions ? Heck yes.

JSON is also a tree structure. Granted one rarely inverts it, but “no trees in the real world” is not true.
Then most of us aren't suitable for jobs where this stuff is important. Google does have 'real' problems involving trees.