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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

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Comments on Are questions about (abstract) algorithms and datastructures considered on-topic?

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Are questions about (abstract) algorithms and datastructures considered on-topic?

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I just noticed this question about data structures in the Q&A. Although algorithms and data structures are often (part of) a solution to a problem when writing software, this question is constructed in a way that aims to leave out the software part entirely. Especially, because I have a strong feeling that this could just have been a question about a problem in Python. If it would have been a Python question, I would have had no doubts that it fits in this community, but in its current form it feels a bit misplaced.

I checked the help and the on-topic list seems to have a strong focus on the software aspect, indicating that this question might not quite belong here. On the other hand, there is nothing in the off-topic list that would indicate that this question does not belong here.

To me, this is more of a computer science question than a programming question. Therefore, I would expect something like this on cs.stackexchange.com rather than stackoverflow.com. Currently, there is no computer science community, so these questions could also be included as on-topic here (until this community is created). On the other hand, it could also be reasonable to require that these kind of questions are to be asked in a concrete software context.

Does anybody have thoughts or opinions about this?

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Related Meta discussion (1 comment)
I don't really see how it "leaves out the software part entirely". It's a problem that can arise duri... (2 comments)
I don't really see how it "leaves out the software part entirely". It's a problem that can arise duri...
Moshi‭ wrote about 1 year ago

I don't really see how it "leaves out the software part entirely". It's a problem that can arise during software development, and has practical and generally implementable solutions. Sure, it doesn't mention a particular language, but we've had [language-agnostic] for a while now.

mr Tsjolder‭ wrote about 1 year ago

I have no problem with the language-agnostic tag. I think my main issue is that this question feels like it originated from Python and was then artificially generalised to cover all languages (or all languages with a data structure for sets that is implemented by a hashtable). In the end, this question (to me) reads like: what is the best data structure to represent sets with a pre-specified set of values. My question is rather whether this kind of questions is supposed to be on-topic here, since I feel like they are substantially different from "is there a faster set implementation in Python?". The specific question is just an example of what I mean.