The thing is, once you learn how to do tree operations, they aren't that hard to do. I'm not talking about learning how to balance a binary tree in the most ef

The thing is, once you learn how to do tree operations, they aren't that hard to do. I'm not talking about learning how to balance a binary tree in the most efficient way possible. I'm talking about the basic ops of breadth- and depth-first traversals of arbitrary trees. I feel like we live in an era of software development that took a stupid meme about "inverting a binary tree" as a job interview question and--not knowing anything about trees--turned it into received wisdom that "trees are hard". But they just aren't. And yet so many people live in fear of them and go to great lengths to avoid having to learn how to use them.