This is something that I feel continually comes up when dealing with implementing data structures in a higher level language, and repeatedly confused me when I

This is something that I feel continually comes up when dealing with implementing data structures in a higher level language, and repeatedly confused me when I was learning this stuff. I always found it misleading for example, to use an existing language implementation of a particular data structure (in this case a JS array) to represent a queue, and then simply provide methods that mock enqueue / dequeue but don't provide the same performance guarantees. All you're doing is mimicking the queue API but actually performing O(N) shift/unshift, which defeats the point of even having the data structure. Not saying you can't do it properly with an Array, but I can't count the number of times I've seen not only blogs, but published educational materials advocate for using an existing Array-like structure as a starting point for a queue, and totally ignore the fact that that structure was not designed to remove from the front. Just my personal opinion, but I think a linked list more clearly illustrates how to properly implement stacks/queues in a higher level language since you're forced to handle the pointers (nodes) yourself.