"A few decades ago [...] if you'd wanted to use a hash table, if you even knew what a hash table was, you'd have to write your own."
I agree with you on the quality of the BSD code, and I'm glad such great code is readily available. But a) I definitely had been programming before 1990 (the copyright on that BSD code), b) back then hash tables were far less tightly integrated with programming languages than they are today and fewer people knew about them, and c) if you want to be pedantic Hash Tables have been around since 1953, so way before most programming languages that are still in use today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table#History - they're however much more commonly understood, and in ubiquitous use today!
Comments
You missed the temporal context of what I wrote:
"A few decades ago [...] if you'd wanted to use a hash table, if you even knew what a hash table was, you'd have to write your own."
I agree with you on the quality of the BSD code, and I'm glad such great code is readily available. But a) I definitely had been programming before 1990 (the copyright on that BSD code), b) back then hash tables were far less tightly integrated with programming languages than they are today and fewer people knew about them, and c) if you want to be pedantic Hash Tables have been around since 1953, so way before most programming languages that are still in use today. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table#History - they're however much more commonly understood, and in ubiquitous use today!