Communications of the ACM,
Vol. 53 No. 4, Pages 33-34
10.1145/1721654.1721668
Data structures are part of the foundation of computer science. It pays to revisit them from time to time.
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1 Comments
Vaibhav Gumashta
I think there is a fundamental difference between Computer Science and the other basic science streams (Physics, Chemistry, Biology). It is quite similar to the difference between Mathematics and the basic streams.
The center of these basic streams is to understand and derive unifying fundamental principles that govern "nature". This is what results in finding out phenomena which quite often Mathematics and Computer Science cannot match. And it is quite unfair to compare these 2 sets of knowledge streams.
One must not forget the aim of Mathematics and later Computer Science was to "help" create methods that would aid the original scientific analysis. So to say, mostly all the mathematical concepts and computer science concepts are created by humans. And research in these domains often either involves more work based on the past work done by humans or taking a fresh perspective at a popular concept.
It is in my opinion very unfair to compare and blindly copy practices from the basic science streams just to match them; since the fundamental objective is very very different
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![[article image]](https://cacm.acm.org/system/assets/0000/2515/031510_CACMpg33_The_Data-Structure.large.jpg?1476779431&1268256603 "data structure illustration")
Vaibhav Gumashta
I think there is a fundamental difference between Computer Science and the other basic science streams (Physics, Chemistry, Biology). It is quite similar to the difference between Mathematics and the basic streams.
The center of these basic streams is to understand and derive unifying fundamental principles that govern "nature". This is what results in finding out phenomena which quite often Mathematics and Computer Science cannot match. And it is quite unfair to compare these 2 sets of knowledge streams.
One must not forget the aim of Mathematics and later Computer Science was to "help" create methods that would aid the original scientific analysis. So to say, mostly all the mathematical concepts and computer science concepts are created by humans. And research in these domains often either involves more work based on the past work done by humans or taking a fresh perspective at a popular concept.
It is in my opinion very unfair to compare and blindly copy practices from the basic science streams just to match them; since the fundamental objective is very very different