I am ashamed to admit that when I was in undergrad I thought red-black trees were the coolest. I liked the mechanics of rotations and the overall balancing of the structure. I still think it's interesting but haven't really used anything beyond lists, sets, and maps in practice.
The reason I started this meetup was because so many people feel like this :)
The funny thing is, 'lists, sets and maps' aren't actually specific data structures—they're actually collections of operations with certain expectations (a.k.a an 'interface'). How is an associative array implemented, for example? The language you use, which provides you with a standard implementation, has made that decision for you. But there are so many more, and they all have trade-offs.
I've never understood the allure of red-black trees. One of the things I have on my agenda is to compare their performance with other, cooler, data structures, to see if perhaps there's a practical reason to favor them.
If it's just the rotations you like, there are umpteen more intuitive tree structures that use them too, like AVL.
O(man) I'm busy then but I would love to come to this in the future! Cool event! Consider inviting professors from CMU, including but not limited to Guy Blelloch and Robert Harper.
