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But, like, as a teen in the 80s by the time I learned C from Kernighan & Ritchie (not an exotic path back then), where a hashmap was one of the examples and the subject of a couple of the problems, it wasn't remotely new to me. The real world had plenty of others learning these things from Byte magazine and such even with no CS degree.

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The big difference was in C you had to implement it yourself. Choosing a hash function and managing memory with malloc() was a hang up for a lot of people. It was quite common to say hashes and the various tree data structures weren't worth the complication if you didn't absolutely need to have a hash table or tree.

In later languages like perl, the syntax for hashes was built into the language.

That was a huge step forward.

Perl was slowly adopted for other reasons (illegible write once syntax). Other popular scripting languages like PHP adopted hashes from perl. This greatly helped make associative arrays common knowledge among the majority of programmers.

also dr. dobbs. https://archive.org/details/dr_dobbs_journal_vol_03/page/n29... is a presentation of 'sam76', an 8080 reimplementation of mcilroy & morris's m6, probably built around an efficient associative array of defined macros. and assemblers built around symbol tables were commonplace at the time, too

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