Refactris
This post is in lieu of writing a proper one, either on the generic maths operators which Marc Gravell has been hard at work on, or on C# 4 which I have a number of opinions about (no surprise there). I will write about both of those topics, but I really ought to do some more work on the manuscript for chapter 2 of the book before I go to bed. Posting a blog entry is a reward for finishing indexing chapters 2 and 13, but both of the serious posts will take longer than I really have time for right now.
So, Refactris. This is a silly idea born a couple of weeks ago, at work. You see, several months ago, I had run out of work on a Friday afternoon at 4pm. My then-team-leader, Rohan, foolishly challenged me to write console-mode Tetris in an hour. I had great fun, and had a demonstrable game of Tetris working precisely one hour later. Now combine that with refactoring, one of the ideas of which is that you can remove lines of code by finding code duplication etc. Put the two together, and you get Refactris.
Letters, digits and symbols would fall from the top, and whenever they landed (in a normal Tetris manner) the game would try to compile the code in the bucket, finding as much to compile as possible. It would try the top line, then the top two lines, then the top three lines, etc, until it reached the bottom - then try the second line, the second and third lines together, etc. Code which compiled would be removed.
Clearly it's a stupid idea, and I haven't actually tried to implement it or anything silly like that. Funny enough to share though, and if any of you wish to give it a go, I'd love to see the results.