The Oulipo is a writing movement that uses constraints to produce ‘potential literature’. (Oulipo is an acronym in French: Workshop of Potential Literature.) It was co-founded by Raymond Queneau, who created 100,000 billion sonnets. It’s been estimated that if you were to read one a minute for 24 hours a day it would take you around 200 million years to get through them all.

If you’re wondering what any of this has to do with computing, consider the following:

Queneau created his massive sonnet collection by writing 10, but cutting up the pages in such a way that line 2 of the first poem, say, could be replaced by line 2 of the eighth poem. Some people have reproduced this using computer programming.
On the subject of programming, there is a group of programming languages known as ‘esoteric languages’, or ‘esolangs’. These are languages that have been developed for experimentation, not to do anything useful. That experimental focus seems very Oulipian to me.
Going back to to the poems, I haven’t tried to re-create that idea. However, I did have some fun creating a spreadsheet to mash up proverbs. This is another Oulipian approach, the results of which are called ‘preverbs’. I wrote about preverbs here: Using preverbs to break writer's block.
Finally, generally speaking constraints can be very useful in computing.

In the recent course I ran, I was more concerned with writing and literature than programming so I won’t dwell on it here. I received some nice feedback though — one comment of which employs an Oulipo technique. It reads like nonsense, but is quite funny!

I loved this taster course, and it was enjoyable, inspiring and entertaining! A great course to remove any writing anxieties and just have fun with words, and interesting twists of probability!
Terry Freedman is a masterpiece. He delivered one of the best courthouses I have been a stuffing on. An engaging roof through workaday with a bit of matricide thrown in. More stump from the wobbler please!
Terry was fantastic! So glad I took the course and look forward to others with him.

I will be running an extended version of the course in June 2023 (5 hours). For more information go here: Writing the Oulipo.

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