Bit o’ History, innit?

Linked lists have been around for a long time. They were invented by Allen Newell, Cliff Shaw and Herbert A. Simon in 1955 as they pioneered early computing and Artificial Intelligence. They became quite popular because they are easy to implement and can be modified for specific purposes. At the time, languages didn’t come pre-packaged with dynamic data structures that can hold an indefinite amount of data and, similar to many of you, programmers wanted more flexibility than what Arrays provide. Linked lists are indeed old, and a part of computing history, but they are still widely used in many older languages and have distinct advantages over other data structures like ArrayLists, Queues or Vectors.

However, in more modern languages (Java, Python, Swift, etc) they are not widely used even when they are a better alternative to the usual ArrayList. Some argue that the advantages that they provide are theoretically true, but modern computers can manage memory so well that the gains are negligible. Interestingly, they are still widely taught in Computer Science data structure classes and you will definitely encounter them again in the future. I see them as a good educational artifact that will live as long as older languages are used.