LEGOs, Play-Doh, and Programming

LEGOs, Play-Doh, and Programming

Nice blog post. :) But I don’t think I agree with your points about Java collections vs Ruby collections. The different collections interfaces/implementations do have different purposes. For example, take HashMap and TreeMap. HashMap is – tadaa – implemented with a hash table and has an average lookup time of O(1). But the thing is, it’s average. It’s not entirely out of the question that someone won’t feed your application with malicious data which forces the HashMap’s lookups to become O(n). A TreeMap is implemented with a binary tree, and thus all lookups are guaranteed to be O(log n), which makes it invulnerable to such attacks. This problem doesn’t apply to everybody and so it depends on the situation whether a HashMap or a TreeMap is best. In Ruby on the other hand, there’s only Hash, with all pros and cons associated with it. While it’s fine for most people, you mig...

Full article: http://weblog.jamisbuck.org/2008/11/9/legos-play-doh-and-...