What Are Hash Tables and Why Are They Amazing?

An explanation that doesn’t assume you’re a developer

Jonathan Hsu
Better Programming
Published in
4 min readMar 24, 2020

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Photo by Florencia Viadana on Unsplash.

Hash tables (commonly referred to as hash maps) are simply amazing. They exist in basically every language, just under different names. If you’re not formally educated in computer science, then you may not even realize that you’ve been using them all along.

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