How do I explain what is data structure to someone who has never programmed before?
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At its most basic, there are tradeoffs you can make when you’re storing data, and those tradeoffs impact how you can later process the data.
For example, imagine you need to store a bunch of names so that you can assign seats to them at an event. You could have everyone line up and give their name to a person who writes them down in order. This is slow, but it’s highly organized, so you won’t take down more names than there are seats and it preserves the order. Alternatively, you could have everyone write down their own name and throw them in a bucket and have one or more people pull them out to assign seats. This is comparatively disorganized but can be done really fast, by dividing the work among multiple people.
Data structures in computers, are the set of ways you can organize storing, reading and modifying data and the associated rules and trade-offs that go with them.
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