the same forwards and backwards

I finished my crossword puzzle-answer builder and learned all sorts of new things, all while going through the stages of grief about my ability to program coherently.

I learned about sets, keeping functions generic, the struggle of debugging conditionals (is Python greedy? I don’t even know.), not shadowing useful things with variable names, intersection, new exceptions, and that letting things percolate is not giving up.

Here is the gist: