in reply to Necessity is the mother of invention
People have been using constraints to spur creativity for a long time. A lot of beautiful poetry has been wrriten under the constraints of rhyme and meter. Perl poetry, too, has its own constraints.
Another type of necessity that spawns invention for me is solving other peoples' problems. The constraint is that their problem and possibly their approach as well should be respected; work within those boundaries to create an elegant solution. If no elegant solution presents itself under these constraints, well, that is a learning experience, too.
And so I have learned a lot about perl and algorithms from solving problems posed by SoPW.
-Mark
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Meditations