> The real benefit of being comfortable with trees and graphs is so that you're comfortable with actually using trees and graphs yourself, directly, when they'd

> The real benefit of being comfortable with trees and graphs is so that you're comfortable with actually using trees and graphs yourself, directly, when they'd be useful to manipulate. If you want to look at a commit log, well, that's a graph, and I guess you can't work with that if you claim that graphs are weird obscure stuff and cringe at the word "acyclic". Want to use a filesystem? Apparently that's a hard thing for some people, sadly enough because it's a tree (or graph, depending on your attitude about soft and hard links). That's where you're writing code that manipulates the actual data structure, instead of just using some lookup-table interface. I am not clear how you are disagreeing with me here. :) Surely manipulating commit logs, understanding say how Git works, squashing commits, rebasing, manipulating access to the file system, surely, these are things that are not out of the realm of being asked to do. Hell, if you are dealing with a freaking linked list at some point or not in your career, you are dealing with a DAG.