Who cares?!

Seriously, who cares? Who cares how HashMap or Hashtable is implemented? Or maybe an ArrayList, ha? How about DynaBlasterRollerCoster? Do you care how it's doing what it's doing?

I just got off a phone interview with some guys in the UK but the same thing was happening in other places. Do you really need to know this? And if so is this ever going to impact the way you design a distributed, highly scalable system if all you know is how to implement a HashMap on your own?

Seriously, we're past that point where we need to manufacture our own specialized collections (even though the Java Collection API sucks big time). Get over it! Maybe when I'll switch back to Microchip MCUs I'll look back to find out how to implement a dictionary then. Oh wait! It's implemented in SDCC already! And I bet there's a pure asm library doing this on Z80 as well.

And if there ain't one laying around there's this thing called Google, with this little box and a "Search" button (hell, these days you don't even have to press this key anymore) that will tell you what you're after

Edit 25.11, 05:17, on the airport: I wonder if the next question (since they asked me if I feel like a polyglot programmer) would be So how's implemented a Hash in Ruby and how does it compare to the inner workings of Dictionary in .NET?. Why not, right?

I just needed to get this out of my system...