In the language of computer science, in order to handle any type of data, we need to load it in a convenient fashion in the memory. The constructs used to store data in the memory are called data structures. For most traditional programming languages, a programmer has to think and decide the right data structure to load and store the data, but Mathematica makes the work easy for us by providing a powerful core data structure that can be used in many different ways.
Lists are the fundamental and most useful data structure to load, manipulate, and store data in Mathematica. They provide a lot of flexibility for handling and representing different kinds of datasets. At the same time, they are simple enough that one can focus on the analysis instead of spending a lot of time coding or figuring out the right data structure to use.
