Great to have you back Leitz!

I find it fun (and helps with motivation) to define a specific arbitrary problem and post my solution/s here at Perl Monks, inviting others to join in and/or give feedback.

For a simple one to get you started, write a function to reverse a string of words. For example, given an input string of:

 "  one   two three four    "
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your function should produce:

 "four three two one"
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That is, the input string reversed word by word, with a single space between each word and with no leading or trailing space. You may assume the input string consists only of alphabetic characters, spaces and tabs.

When you're done, take a look at the many instructive replies at: Five Ways to Reverse a String of Words (C#, Perl 5, Perl 6, Ruby, Haskell) ... wow, just remembered this challenge provoked a Perl 6 reply from The Larry himself (aka TimToady)!

Some more examples of this approach:

• Rosetta Dispatch Table (Interview Question)
• Tales from writing a RPN evaluator in Perl 5, Perl 6 and Haskell
• High Performance Game of Life

Conway's classic Game of Life was my favourite, I became a bit obsessed with it - being a meatier problem, it took way more time than the others. Sadly, John Horton Conway, the inventor of the Game of Life, died last year of COVID-19.