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Comment by grayhairmomma | Hacker News Reader

Of course it's doable. Like I said on my website, I need to get off my ass and start coding up linked lists, binary search trees and sorts "til I fucking throw up all over Manhattan". Yes, of course it's doable. I'm no dummy. I can stumble through it on the whiteboard as well -- I'm not deaf, dumb and clueless -- I don't just stand there at the whiteboard listlessly, with blank stares, if that's what you mean. If I practice enough, reciting from memory (and on the whiteboard), coding the stuff up perfectly will be trivial. But to me, that's gaming the interview.

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Rather than memorizing stuff forever, you could develop your intuitions about data structure design trade-offs and what makes them behave the ways they do. After I learned OCaml, a lot of data structure design seemed obvious.

Also, read _Purely Functional Data Structures_ by Chris Okasaki. Unlike (say) CLRS (http://mitpress.mit.edu/algorithms/), it's even a pretty short book.

Exactly. The OP thinks that when I ask her to reverse a linked list, I expect her to whip out the perfect code from memory on the fly. I would be even more suspicious if you did that actually. I want you to structure the data. I want you to try out variants of reversing. It is ok if you can't give me the optimal solution in 5 minutes, as long as you demonstrate the capability to reason with data structures and pointers and tools at hand.

I'd actually recommend not reading Chris's book in isolation. There are a lot of things that are ugly to do in functional languages (w/ respect to data structures), but are easy with assignment (and of course vice-versa). I'd read Chris's book with Sedgewick (Sedgewick is a super applied algorithms text). This will help give a good balance.

I partially suggested it because it uses SML for the code. Even if one doesn't use OCaml / SML for actual programming, using the notation will probably help quite a bit with reasoning about data structures.

I've been reading through this lately:

http://ask.metafilter.com/158740/You-were-doing-it-wrong

Somewhere in there, about half way down, is

Was 30 before I realized that it's not cheating to study to learn something or to work hard at something to get better at it.

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