Well, the point of binary trees and linked lists is also more of what gaius said.
Yes, it definitely helps to be able to visualize how things are structured, but I think the biggest thing you learn comes from understanding the asymptotic performance of various operations on those data structures.
Without understanding these structures, the fact that one provides much faster lookup, but slower deletes seems totally arbitrary and magical.
(Not sure I'm so much disagreeing with you as elaborating here.)
Thanks - I should have elaborated more. I was meaning more of the way memory is structured and accessed. Yes, it's all abstracted now - but it's still important to know and understand.
Yes, it definitely helps to be able to visualize how things are structured, but I think the biggest thing you learn comes from understanding the asymptotic performance of various operations on those data structures.
Without understanding these structures, the fact that one provides much faster lookup, but slower deletes seems totally arbitrary and magical.
(Not sure I'm so much disagreeing with you as elaborating here.)