[brianmurphy]

The big difference was in C you had to implement it yourself. Choosing a hash function and managing memory with malloc() was a hang up for a lot of people. It was quite common to say hashes and the various tree data structures weren't worth the complication if you didn't absolutely need to have a hash table or tree.

In later languages like perl, the syntax for hashes was built into the language.

That was a huge step forward.

Perl was slowly adopted for other reasons (illegible write once syntax). Other popular scripting languages like PHP adopted hashes from perl. This greatly helped make associative arrays common knowledge among the majority of programmers.