[trailnay]

"Not the place to swing around"? Firstly, there's plenty of entrepreneurs here who don't code at all. Secondly, that's a really silly thing to say. Do you honestly think that you can't be a great Rails engineer without having fluency with linked lists off the top of your head in an interview type situation? I can think of a thousand questions that would give me a much more accurate idea of how good a candidate would be as a web developer and the day to day issues they would face.

[yeukhon]

Sorry, that's not silly at all. You are taking the wrong context and you are fooling yourself thinking it is unimportant to question abililty.

Linked list is the simplest data structure one can pick it up in 5 minutes in using languages like Ruby and Python.

Do you honestly think any serious entrepreneurs would want a company growing hire someone who can't even tell you the basic of a linked list (can you imagine one cannot even tell you what a linked list is and the time complexity?)

You didn't even read my comment at all. A lot of things can be done by integrating with the ecosystem out there; but many of the libraries out there are horribly written and there are things you just can't build out of these libraries you find on PyPI.

People who build successful products cannot rely on an ecosystem forever. There are crucial components must be built by engineers using data structures and algorithms we know from textbook and then write custom algorithms that work for the use case.

Too bad. Some people just want to get away with ecosystem all the time; truth is you just cannot.

If a candidate never heard of linked list, wtf does that say about this candidate? Why would I want to hire him if he didn't even attempt to study a few one? I don't expect anyone to write a damn red-black tree algorithm; I can't and I doubt few people is capable of writing that algorithm from scratch (or even remember half of the properties).

[rhizome]

Please describe a use-case for linked lists in Ruby and/or Rails where Array would not suffice.

[yeukhon]

Stop this stupid ruby python library is suffice. If you don't bother to read my comments above how libraries are not enough, then forget it.

Why do we even bother to teach linked list or any algorithm if we can just rely on all the libraries out there?

[rhizome]

So we can use them as shibboleths when interviewing people for Rails and Python jobs, apparently. But evidently I triggered some anger management issue of yours, so I'll just walk on eggshells from here on out.