A conference talk inspired by the French literary movement Oulipo, which imposed artificial constraints on writing (like writing a novel without the letter E). The speaker explores what happens when programmers impose similar constraints on their code — such as solving FizzBuzz without using 'if' statements. Working through examples in C, Java, and Python, the speaker discovers that removing familiar constructs can lead to unexpected insights, like accidentally arriving at Haskell-style pattern matching while coding in C. The talk also explores solving the knight's tour chess problem using 10 different algorithms (backtracking, ant colony optimization, genetic algorithms, Monte Carlo tree search, etc.) as an analogy for the 100 different writing styles in Oulipo works. The core message: self-imposed constraints in programming are invitations to think differently, discover underused language features, and rediscover joy in coding.
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