World is a big place. Well, it used to be.
It still is, but since the advent of information technology and tools to get information from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world; World does seems to be a relatively small place.
I was working on some code – PHP arrays to be specific – and I had an array with 3 keys sorted in ascending order – 4,8 and 9. Since I needed the first array’s key (i.e. 4) and there is no default method to return the first array element, I quickly google to get a solution – array_values($arr)[0] – from this particular page – http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1921421/get-the-first-element-of-an-array.
That being said, I happened to see a comment wherein someone mentioned that being from a .Net background, he/she was surprised to see so much up-votes for the question, and the fairly simple solution as well.
Out of curiosity, I googled for the same query but with the “.Net” appended to my query, which landed me to this stack-overflow page – http://stackoverflow.com/questions/19347933/visual-basic-first-element-of-array.
And that led me to another interesting page entitled “Why numbering should start at zero” – http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD08xx/EWD831.html
This one was an entry by E.J. Dijkstra – renowned computer scientist, famous for the Dijkstra’s Algrithm (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dijkstra%27s_algorithm).
While on the page, I noticed a quote:
“In corporate religions as in others, the heretic must be cast out not because of the probability that he is wrong but because of the possibility that he is right.”
– By Antony Jay, whose Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_Jay) mentioned that he was one of the writer of the popular British comedy “Yes Minister”, which in turn took me to my teenage years when I used to see this series(yes, it was broadcast in India) on DD-2 (as it was called, short for Delhi Doordarshan channel 2).
From working on PHP’s array, I landed to the “Yes Minister”‘s Wiki page, learning more about Dijkstra’s algorithm on the way, I concluded – Knowledge is connected.
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