There are, of course, languages that don't have an equivalent structure, but for those that are sufficiently popular, it's almost certain that someone has written a library that emulates associative arrays and then fairly certain that that library, in turn, has been used in production somewhere.

File this under "If it's stupid but it works..."

[–] [email protected] 19 points 3 months ago

I'm just poking fun that the fundamental type in JS (Object) is an associative-array/hashmap. Technically it has some fancy under-the-hood handling for pure arrays and primitive types. This is also exactly true of Lua, and a little true of Ruby and Python.

Really, most programmers would do great to start with a hash map or array list and only specialize out further when the problem calls for it.