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1 Answer
Yee Lee
Yee Lee, Built four startups on Rails
Updated 230w ago · Author has 179 answers and 640.3k answer views
I love the nerd humor and culture that went into that instance method.  :-)

Remember:
  • Rails Core Array class has convenient helper methods to access the second, third, fourth, fifth elements of an array.  I.e., Array#first is a native Ruby Array method, so David Heinemeier Hansson (a.k.a., DHH, the creator of Rails) decided that Rails should provide developers with Array#second, Array#third, etc.
  • DHH is known to hold strong opinions about things, not the least of which is the naming and number of convenience helpers
  • "42" is widely known (ok, well, at least to Douglas Adams fans) to be the Ultimate Answer to Life, The Universe, and Everything -- see: 42 (number)

So, the folks in the "Programming" subreddit community were giving DHH a lot of grief over "more helpers"-- see: DHH, more helpers!
And as a humorous/snarky jab at the "social wisdom and positive constructiveness all around" of Reddit (as described in Active Support Core Extensions), DHH added an Array#forty_two helper method for accessing the 42nd array element.  Funny, right?

Also: the ensuing commentary about re-naming this new helper to be the more grammatically-correct "Array#forty_second" was pretty entertaining, too.
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