Linked Lists
What is my problem with linked lists? I love them. They’re simple and ingeniously so. I understand them and I know how they work. I could write one from scratch. So why do I have this aversion to them (and for that matter arrays)? It feels like laziness. Somehow the idea of sitting down and writing one, despite the fact that it would completely be the simple, God given key to writing an interesting program, find myself irritated by the very idea of doing so?
Maybe it’s that I learned it using the word ‘Node’. Something about it puts me off. Kind of like how PHP uses dollar signs preceding variable names (or the really irritating fact that the dot operator is signified by a plus sign and the symbol for concatenation [generally indicated by a plus sign since concatenation can easily be seen as Adding Things Together] is a fucking dot.). It irritates me- look at a page of PHP code and you’ll see- a bunch of dollar signs, question marks (particularly irritating) and angle brackets and leading double underscores
__who $wants.(’ to’) <?read> $that?
Irritating. So the word “Node” is like that to me. Maybe. Even the name “Linked Lists” puts me off. I hate lists- they make me think of grocery lists and to-do lists and I hate those. I don’t use them, fail miserably, because of it and I’m fine with that. I probably should address that too. What to call it though? Pointer Chain? At least it’s got chains. What to call a Node? A Node I guess. I lose. A Pointer? How is it different than a neatly designed system of organizing pointers? I guess I should get over my aversion to the term Linked LIst. Maybe I should just start naming nodes “Pointer”. PHP is still ugly though.