I have been reading a book called "How to think like Einstein." I have yet to read through half of it, but I have gathered that he was a very notorious rulebreaker, and that contributed greatly to his early successes.

This looks much like as an oversimplification. Historically, special relativity as an early success may be interpreted along the lines you suggest, but it is well known that many many people, including e.g. Henri Poincaré were very near to it. It has been suggested that they didn't publish anything because the hypothesis was so revolutionary back then as to be risky as well, for people with a good academic reputation and that Einstein, on the contrary was working for the patent's office at that time, so in some sense he had nothing to lose.

Perl seems like the natural place for using that way of thinking, so I have come to ask: what are your ways of breaking the rules in learning/doing perl?

I can only quote what others told you in this thread and my personal experience has always been that those who boast about breaking the rules are recognized as freaks by public acclaim. OTOH experienced hackers do so all the time, but in a way that turns out to be more along the lines of "respecting other rules" than "breaking the rules" tout court. In some sense this is what happened with Einstein and special relativity as hinted above: galilean laws of transformation had to be changed because Maxwell's equations are already, intrinsically relativistic, and experimental evidence confirmed them.

Also a genius is a genius (incidentally Einstein, however important his contributions has been, in some respects was somewhat less of a genius than some other scientists of a lesser fame) but most of us are not. Geniuses get it right for themselves, but not quite for everybody, well not always anyway. Donald E. Knuth is a genius too, in fact it's not always easy to put one's hands on stuff created by him...

Then it occured to me: I can just look at the answers when I get to the questions, since it's in a self learning environment. Obviously, in an academic environment, it's too costly to risk, but this is different. That's my tip. What say you, fellow monks?

Well I never learnt Perl through exercises from a book, but rather from problems I had to work hands on for my own needs; OTOH I think that looking at the solutions can be instructive, but I doubt that as a general rule it can be more than trying to think at least a little bit of them on your own first.

In reply to Re: Breakin' the rules, Breakin' the rules by blazar
in thread Breakin' the rules, Breakin' the rules by esk555

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