Linked Lists - Computerphile

Linked Lists explained: Dr Alex Pinkney returns to Computerphile.

Apologies for the traffic noise on this episode - we tried filming outside in London which it turns out didn't work that well for audio!

This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.

[aksela]

The traffic noise wasn't that bad. I heard everything that was being said and it added an interesting background.

[mmanuel]

I love how you pointed out some used cases of the linked lists in real life! It helps me appreciate the data structure and makes me want to learn more!

[hamzashakeel]

Really nice video. You should do more videos on data structures like binary trees, stacks, and queues.

[diogofolques]

Lot's of people saying linked lists are sh*t in terms of performance, and that might be true, however they are very useful to start learning data structures, so you can more easily learn other kinds of structures like binary trees

[陈瀚龙]

The best explanation of anything in 10 minutes I've seen, and the best jumping into linked lists explanation I've seen. Thanks, Doc! Love the on the street tutorial. Reminds me of many on the fly, brilliant napkin tutorials I've had with professors and genius artists over the years, with ale, coffee, or tea.

[Brandon_]

This is better than an entire college lecture

[AssailantLF]

I'm loving these recent programming concept explanation videos! I hope the channel progresses to the more complex data structures over time, as those would benefit from the explanations more than the simple stuff.

[AnthonyHartwig]

Nerds make me happy. Makes me miss the CS culture from college. Keep up the awesomeness on this channel!

[greenolvi]

9:20 my thought 'unless you're using vim'. Few seconds after in the video 'unless you're using something like vim'. Great video :-)

[patrickmayer]

The comparison to tab history was genius! Thanks for the explanation!

[grzesiekx]

I really like how he explains things! I am working now on linked lists and it really helps to understand ! Thanks :)

[jayyyzeee]

Brings back fond memories of undergrad Comp Sci classes. Not one mention though of memory deallocation, the worst developer sin in languages without memory management.

[craigrotay]

I'm very impressed with Dr A here bcs he is so simplifying a concept that is extremely complicated.

[saindst]

Oh my an actual damn example wtf. Its mad how a real world example just makes everything click

[WarriorAjk]

The wikipedia example he gave was a pretty good application of linked list. Nicely explained!

[PeoniesRoses]

The noise wasn't too bad, I was just confused as to why you were casually explaining data structures in the streets of London, but oh well. Quite refreshing, I guess :D

[Woozeesh]

Wow. Where did he get all of that antique fan-fold printer paper? I haven't seen that much ffp since my freshman engineering days back in the 80's.

[DrRChandra]

"Pointing at null" seems semantically slightly different than saying "null pointer", which is what my CS courses taught me to put at the end of a linked list. "Pointing at null" means it's pointing at something (that happens to be null), whereas the concept of null pointer is that it isn't pointing at anything at all.

[raunak]

You have no idea how helpful is this for new learners like me

[PEGuyMadison]

My first class on C was in 1989, the professor started out by saying "I assume you all know how programming languages work, so we are going to focus on pointers and system programming in this class"

I am a heavy user of linked lists but they also have their limits, I have found they are great for joining data into a pseudo array but when it comes to searching an array is much faster and an array is just a basic list.

When it comes to multicore use a list with locks can be troublesome but far outweighs the impact of cache invalidations and excess memory bandwidth. For multiprocessors you can break down lists into per-core tasks and join them at the end of each task which will far out perform a array copy.

Both have their advantages but profiling and ease of use also need to be considered.