Compare ArrayList and LinkedList honestly. Why is LinkedList almost never the right choice in practice?

ArrayList is a contiguous array: O(1) random access and cache-friendly iteration, with amortized O(1) appends and O(n) middle inserts/removes due to shifting.

LinkedList offers O(1) insert/remove only if you already hold the node, but indexing is O(n) and every element is a separately allocated node, killing cache locality and inflating memory. In real workloads ArrayList's locality usually wins even for inserts, so LinkedList is rarely justified — its main legitimate use is as a Deque/queue, where ArrayDeque is typically still faster.