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Welcome to Software Development on Codidact!

Will you help us build our independent community of developers helping developers? We're small and trying to grow. We welcome questions about all aspects of software development, from design to code to QA and more. Got questions? Got answers? Got code you'd like someone to review? Please join us.

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 8 months 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 8 months 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.