Are there any lesser-known or underused data structures that you think should get more attention?
I’m asking because I recently implemented a custom tree structure to simplify some financial operations, and it made the solution look way simpler (where otherwise it would have been quite a mess). Trees aren’t exactly rare, of course, but it made me really appreciate how powerful the right data structure can be for a given problem.
If you have a 2 dimensional sheet of paper, with 3 syntax characters (space to separate words, newline to separate nodes, and a space to create scopes), you can create a tree representation of any structure ('All structures are trees' [0]). This is so useful and profound and will radically simplify the software world over the next 10 years.
Now if you have 4 dimensions, there's other things you can do, but at this time, trees in 2D using the PPS stack (Particles, Parsers, and Scroll), are quite revolutionary and will help you scale exactly what you found in this case to all your software cases (going from quite a mess to way simpler).