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Comment by pradn | Hacker News Reader

There are now attempts to create a "periodic table" for data structures. Such a table would allow you to predict variations of data structures and the behavior of such variants. You can see such an example in page 7 of the PDF below.

https://stratos.seas.harvard.edu/files/stratos/files/periodi...

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That's pretty interesting, I look forward to see what comes out of this! People often tend to conflate "computer science" with "professional software development" and I admit my first reaction was "so what? I routinely use just a small handful of data structures, do we really need something like this?" but seeing it visually laid out in an easily-digestible format is somehow inspiring. From a scientific perspective I can imagine discovering more advanced structures much like "missing" elements from the periodic table.

Are neural networks (for example from TensorFlow) considered data structures?

They store data, so maybe it would have been nice to mention them in the paper even if it's to put them out of scope for X reasons.

This is very nice! Allow me to make a post about it :)

I'm very interested to read this paper, but the grammar mistake in the first sentence of the first section doesn't bode well...

Is it the is/are issue?

Maybe they are using it as a mass noun or speaking specifically about the the phrase itself or the idea of data structures. Could stem from a cultural or ESOL reason.

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