Quotes & Sayings About Data Structures

If she doesn't learn about data structures at home, she'll just learn about it on the streets." Sandra laughed. This was Greg's stock answer for all the age-inappropriate activities he tried to teach the kids. Most of them were odd, but benign, like computer programming. However some - like coaching them to win every argument by declaring, That sounds like something Hitler would say -were much less benign. — Penny Reid

It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures. — Anonymous

into large and complex datasets is a prevalent theme in current visualization research for which different approaches are pursued. Topology-based methods are built on the idea of abstracting characteristic structures such as the topological skeleton from the data and to construct the visualization accordingly. Even — Helwig Hauser

Morphological information has provided the greatest single source of data in the formulation and development of the theory of evolution and that even now, when the preponderance of work is experimental, the basis for interpretation in many areas of study remains the form and relationships of structures. — Everett C. Olson

Procedural code (code using data structures) makes it easy to add new functions without changing the existing data structures. OO code, on the other hand, makes it easy to add new classes without changing existing functions. — Robert C. Martin

Facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts do not go away while scientists debate rival theories for explaining them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air pending the outcome. — Stephen Jay Gould

The key to a solid foundation in data structures and algorithms is not an exhaustive survey of every conceivable data structure and its subforms, with memorization of each's Big-O value and amortized cost. — Robert Love

Database Management System [Origin: Data + Latin basus "low, mean, vile, menial, degrading, ounterfeit."] A complex set of interrelational data structures allowing data to be lost in many convenient sequences while retaining a complete record of the logical relations between the missing items.
From The Devil's DP Dictionary — Stan Kelly-Bootle

Smart data structures and dumb code works a lot better than the other way around. — Eric S. Raymond

I had some of the students in my finance class actually do some empirical work on capital structures, to see if we could find any obvious patterns in the data, but we couldn't see any. — Merton Miller

Present-day democratic structures just cannot collect and process the relevant data fast enough, and most voters don't understand biology and cybernetics well enough to form any pertinent opinions. Hence traditional democratic politics is losing control of events, and is failing to present us with meaningful visions of the future. — Yuval Noah Harari

Bad programmers worry about the code. Good programmers worry about data structures and their relationships. — Linus Torvalds

Realize you won't master data structures until you are working on a real-world problem and discover that a hash is the solution to your performance woes. — Robert Love

Generally, the craft of programming is the factoring of a set of requirements into a a set of functions and data structures. — Douglas Crockford

The programmer's primary weapon in the never-ending battle against slow system is to change the intramodular structure. Our first response should be to reorganize the modules' data structures. — Fred Brooks

With the old economics destroyed, organizational forms perfected for industrial production have to be replaced with structures optimized for digital data. It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves - the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public - has stopped being a problem. — Clay Shirky

Compassion is what you're good at. I'm better at complex searches through organized data structures. — Orson Scott Card

The complement is also true: Procedural code makes it hard to add new data structures because all the functions must change. OO code makes it hard to add new functions because all the classes must change. — Robert C. Martin

Learn when and how to use different data structures and their algorithms in your own code. This is harder as a student, as the problem assignments you'll work through just won't impart this knowledge. That's fine. — Robert Love

Programming is a science dressed up as art, because most of us don't understand the physics of software and it's rarely, if ever, taught. The physics of software is not algorithms, data structures, languages, and abstractions. These are just tools we make, use, and throw away. The real physics of software is the physics of people. Specifically, it's about our limitations when it comes to complexity and our desire to work together to solve large problems in pieces. This is the science of programming: make building blocks that people can understand and use easily, and people will work together to solve the very largest problems. — Pieter Hintjens

It's only because the data force us into corners that we are inspired to create the highly counterintuitive structures that form the basis for modern physics. — Sean Carroll

Like an app straining for a song, data science is about finding patterns...to devise methods, structures, even shortcuts to find the signal amidst the noise. We're all looking for our own Parson's code. Something so simple and yet so powerful in a once-in-a-lifetime discovery, but luckily there are a lot of lifetimes out there. And for any problem that data science might face, this book ["Dataclysm: Love, Sex, Race, and Identity--What Our Online Lives Tell Us About Our Offline Selves"] has been my way to say: I like our odds. — Christian Rudder

What the ethnographer is in fact faced with - except when (as, of course, he must do) he is pursuing the more automatized routines of data collection - is a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which he must contrive somehow first to grasp and then to render. And this is true at the most down-to-earth, jungle field work levels of his activity; interviewing informants, observing rituals, eliciting kin terms, tracing property lines, censusing households ... writing his journal. Doing ethnography is like trying to read (in the sense of "construct a reading of") a manuscript - foreign, faded, full of ellipses, incoherencies, suspicious emendations, and tendentious commentaries, but written not in conventionalized graphs of sound but in transient examples of shaped behavior. — Clifford Geertz

He liked to start sentences with okay, so. It was a habit he had picked up from the engineers. He thought it made him sound smarter, thought it made him sound like them, those code jockeys, standing by the coffee machine, talking faster than he could think, talking not so much in sentences as in data structures, dense clumps of logic with the occasional inside joke. He liked to stand near them, pretending to stir sugar into his coffee, listening in on them as if they were speaking a different language. A language of knowing something, a language of being an expert at something. A language of being something more than an hourly unit. — Charles Yu

Data dominates. If you've chosen the right data structures and organized things well, the algorithms will almost always be self-evident. Data structures, not algorithms, are central to programming. — Rob Pike