Software Engineering discussion

The hash table is my favorite data structure... mostly because of its great scale ability (it has an O(1), or constant time, computational complexity). Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 3" devotes 35 pages to the topic of hashing... there are many implementation choices to make when building a hash table. So, it was particularly interesting for me to see how Python made those choices, and to see how those choices varied across Python implementations.

I liked this chapter too. This sheds some nice light in to what's "under the covers". When using C# dictionaries, I just assume things will work fine without considering the details. How these tables and structures scale and grow is my favorite part.