Hash Table has basically been elevated to a general idea lately. Pretty much anyone that is looking for an association between keys and values is using what they will call a hash table. To that end, few people actually know anything about how they are implemented. (And apologies if this comes across as negative, I do not mean it as a value judgement.)
This was different back when you would pick something like an alist to store associations. There the implementation stared you in the face. Same for the times you had to implement your own hash table. I don't exactly yearn for those days. Though, I am curious if alists actually win in speed for a large number of smaller hash tables.
Depends on implementations of the alist and of the hash table. It is even fully possible that the small hash table will use an alist for the cases with few (and small) elements.
Fair. I was making a huge assumption that the alist would be implemented as you statically see it in code.
My point was supposed to be that an alist really has an obvious implementation, whereas a hashtable actually does not. My main objection being that there is a ton of glossing over what goes into an actual hashtable. While I would expect someone to be able to do a basic alist implementation, I have grown away from expecting folks to do a basic hash table.
This was different back when you would pick something like an alist to store associations. There the implementation stared you in the face. Same for the times you had to implement your own hash table. I don't exactly yearn for those days. Though, I am curious if alists actually win in speed for a large number of smaller hash tables.