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by sp332 5138 days ago
See the section titled "On the Glaring Omission."
1 comments

From my perspective, the point of a Data Structures class is not so that students can implement a red-black tree or skip-list off the top of their head- it's so that the performance characteristics of those structures and their associated algorithms will be deeply engrained. I've never needed to implement a hashmap from scratch in industrial code, but I've sure as hell needed to understand how they work beyond simply memorizing "insertions and lookups approach constant time". Algorithms is a similar story. I think leaving those courses out of a programming curriculum will result in mediocre programmers at best.