It all began when I wanted to return more than one value from one of the methods. Although my attempts ended futile, it was fun exploring and musing how things could have been.

There are at least a couple of options to return multiple values from a method:-

1. return an instance of a class that holds the values
2. return a tuple

IoC - Inversion of control, is a design that enables fluid flow of control by decoupling tight dependencies between the portion of a code that exhibits behavior and another portion of code that provides required functionality. One form of IoC, as we know, is Dependency Injection (DI). For instance, a TextEditor could refer an ISpellChecker instead of direct coupling to a specific implementation of spell checker thereby enabling the text editor to switch spell checker or even use more than one.

Today, we question our beliefs! Is string really immutable?

  
string message = "Hello World!";

Console.WriteLine(message); // Prints "Hello World!"

unsafe {
  int length = message.Length;
  
  fixed (char *p = message) {
    for (int index = 0; index < length; ++index) {
      *(p + index) = '?';
    }
  }
}

Console.WriteLine(message); // Prints what? See for yourself!

Those of us, non-physicists, we do seem to realize that time is eternal. Yet there was a time when time did not exist; tough to comprehend? For us, time is something running on a clock or tracked on a calendar. Let me share what I think about when time did not exist.

In the recent interviews, I asked the candidates the following question:

Is there a difference that I need to consider in the following declarations? Both allocate fixed size array to store integers:

int[] na1 = new int[10];
Integer[] na2 = new Integer[10];

A short while ago, I had to write a compelling document for a client about a library that I had developed during my tenure, call it A-Team Library or ATL. Having to learn the “eyes-wide-shut” culture to maintain the couples-of-decades old code and simultaneously develop on the top of it was very disheartening. It was time a lot of things were given fresh thoughts. Not the least of all duplication of code and functionality. But not just that. Like in a programming language, when there is more than one way of doing something, when those ways are opposing, it causes nothing but confusion. So was the case. The business seemed to be far from realizing it.

The ubiquitous and the universal data structure in PHP is the [array][1]. It is an amalgamation of commonly used data structures – list, map etc. In the recent times, PHP has also adopted object orientation and introduced classes. The syntactic difference in the way a property of an array and object poses an inconvenience in the user code¹ specifically when there is a need to interact with code that is not open for change; legacy or not.