> In any program that has to handle just tenthousands of items ocasionally, knowing the difference between arrays, liked lists and pointer lists, or between various forms of hash tables, various forms of trees and sorted lists makes a big difference. This kind of knowledge affects how any program scales with input size and should be one of the first things checked when optimizing.
Exactly. If a developer is picking data structures without any consideration of their growth complexity they're going to cause serious issues.
But not until it's gone to production, and everyone's gotten an "attaboy" for completing their project and moved on to green pastures. Those sudden problems with performance in production are now the operations team's problem, to out provision or get a maintenance team on it.
Yeah, I know it's not that way in a company with good management and technical leadership... but I've been burnt enough to have a "get off my lawn" hat for this occasion.
Exactly. If a developer is picking data structures without any consideration of their growth complexity they're going to cause serious issues.