title: Advanced data structures in practice
body: <p>In the 10 years I've been programming, I can count the number of data structures I've used on one hand: arrays, linked lists (I'm lumping stacks and queues in with this), and dictionaries. This isn't really surprising given that nearly all of the applications I've written fall into the forms-over-data / CRUD category.</p>
  
  <p>I've never needed to use a red-black tree, skip list, double-ended queue, circularly linked list, priority queue, heaps, graphs, or any of the dozens of exotic data structures that have been researched in the past 50 years. I feel like I'm missing out.</p>
  
  <p>This is an open-ended question, but where are these "exotic" data structures used in practice? Does anyone have any real-world experience using these data structures to solve a particular problem?</p>