It is fun and instructive to identify the strategies other developers have used. I thought of a few more: combination - The World Wide Web is a combination o

It is fun and instructive to identify the strategies other developers have used. I thought of a few more: combination - The World Wide Web is a combination of hypertext documents and the Internet, which had both been around for a long time when Tim Berners-Lee thought of combining them. change one thing - Almost every week, several new text editors are announced on Hacker News. Most have one unique feature that distinguishes it from all the others. It might be internal - a new data struture for storing text buffers. Or it might be in the user interface or appearance - a new method for sizing and placing windows when another buffer is opened. change the programming language - A variation on the above. How can you do X in language Y? Can you get an improvement by using a particular language feature? make it smaller - How small can you make a text editor, language compiler, chess playing program, ray tracer ... ?