DevOps Articles

Self-Replicating Programs? At Play in the Wild World of Quines

Talk about software development is dominated by practical considerations,” developer/podcaster Adam Gordon Bell told me Friday in an email. But programming is also an act of creativity, and there’s also a real value in the way that programmers play. So in a recent podcast, Bell spent an hour discussing a rollicking collection of humorous programming oddities known as the cursed computer iceberg meme.

One way to think of it is just as a puzzle,” Bell began his podcast episode on quines.

Later in his 2021 podcast, Bell noted the real point of that lecture: that there are compilers that generate compilers, in an almost quine-like pattern.