jamis

Thanks for stating it more clearly than I did! You've nailed it. It's always bothered me when people dismiss their ability to learn a thing, because they think some part will be difficult. They really have no idea. Yes, the task as a whole will have difficult parts, but we as individual human beings are far more capable than we give ourselves credit for.

Agree about debugging. To my thinking, though, there are two types of "programming": professional (for day jobs, where debugging, testing, and maintainability matter), and recreational (where the point is to just explore new things and try crazy stuff that no one in their right mind would ever "really" do). This "def" stuff falls into the latter category.

Honestly, I wish there were more people doing posts about recreational programming topics. WhyTheLuckyStiff was one of the last great recreational Rubyists. I miss that kind of no-holds-barred exploration.

Thanks! I'm not the first to talk about using IRB for interactive fiction, but I think I might be the first to do so using nested defs. :) IRB-based Zork would be awesome! I hope someone does that.

The article links to my github repository for a wordsearch utility I wrote (here: https://github.com/jamis/wordsearch) and it includes a description of a technique for embedding a message in the unused letters of a wordsearch puzzle.

Backtracking works well to try and fit words in tightly, but (especially in cases where the words just BARELY fit) it can take a long time to generate the puzzles. I'm sure that judicious use of heuristics could prune unprofitable branches more quickly and speed things up, but I've not explored those optimizations at all.

Good point. I was relying mostly on the words being sufficiently complex that the odds of them appearing by chance would be small, but enforcing that assumption would be a good exercise.