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But what you should realize is that the person who wrote this beautiful piece of code is someone who is at the peak of their career, a thinker, an artist, and that it must be ok to not ever rise to his level, because this is close to a master-piece. Few of these geniuses become professors, is just a guess, because no matter how quirky you are you always get a job somewhere.

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I think Norvig's actually improved substantially since he wrote this — he wasn't at the peak of his career! But yes, it's a masterpiece, and yes, it's okay to not ever rise to that level, because even if nothing you ever create is as worthwhile as this, it's still worthwhile. Hacking is fun! And sometimes very useful, too.

(Also note that, despite appearances, this isn't the work of one man. Norvig didn't design Python and didn't invent the tabling technique for speeding up search; and Darius found a couple of bugs in the code. That doesn't mean it's not an authentic Norvig masterpiece.)

Sir, btw, I need a rule that I can use intuitively when deciding on wether to concatenate two words and when to put a dash between them. Do you have one?

Sir, it depends entirely on how widely used the compound word in question is. Hyphenated compounds that become sufficiently familiar lose their hyphen.

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