It's like "try this, or try that", or "this does this and that does this". That's all well and good, but how did you decide to try this and try that?

I addressed this in the first JAPH talk I gave. It went like First you get an idea, then you work out the details. Getting the idea can come from many sources: studying the manual page, reading Perl forums like comp.lang.perl.misc, p5p, The Perl Journal, or from IRC. If you look at my first set of slides, there's a section labelled "The making of a Japh". It discusses the process that started with seeing someone use &%%hole in a non-Perl related usenet group and ended with the Japh:

               split // => '"';
${"@_"} = "/"; split // => eval join "+" => 1 .. 7;
*{"@_"} = sub {foreach (sort keys %_)  {print "$_ $_{$_} "}};
%{"@_"} = %_ = (Just => another => Perl => Hacker); &{%{%_}};
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Abigail