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A developer who knows the basics will have less chances of doing stupid mistakes when dealing with algorithms. Data structures are the bread and butter of coding.

Like all things, if you want to make a high building, you better have a strong base.

Now it's true that the grunt of a programmer's work won't be such a problem, especially since there is a need for more coders out there.

But still, I'd still prefer being conservative and be sure any average coder (even more so for an engineer) knows about some data structures.

I still vividly remember that time some student argued that vectors and lists were about the same thing.



Perhaps I am missing something, but aren't vectors and lists almost equivalent?


Well yes, but the big difference is that you don't have random access with lists, you have O(n). Bjarne Stroutup talked about lists too.


That's more of an implementation detail of C++, no?


Not really.




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