how to make programming terrible for everyone

Summary

A full-page ad for The Last One software system, post-processed with various effects by me. BYTE magazine Aug. 1981, pg. 196(click through for more a readable version) I was recently shocked to learn that The Daily WTF is still running after all these years. It seems like such a time capsule now; a write-in blog making fun of the absolute nonsense programmers encounter in the field. Marvel at the 24 nested stringReplace calls! Check out this trilingual ASP.NET SQL query that generates both HTML and Javascript! Watch The PHP God non-deterministically divide by zero! To me it evokes an era of IRC channels, PHP, subversion, and logging into the production server to update the code. Simpler times. These days it’s a lot of very obtuse React. There is one snippet from that time that really stuck in my brain though. It reached above the nonsense layer and into the philosophical. And that is the story of The Quine Programmer. See, unlike the typical inanity and wacky code snippets of the site, the Quine Programmer (and the Quine System they create) get at some very fundamental questions about programming. Though it’s not technically a quine - that would require producing the actual program’s source code - the so-called Quine Programmer has built a system that can do just about anything, given the right configuration. And they’ve presumably built it using a programming language, which is a system that can do just about anything, given the right code. So naturally we have to ask: What is the difference between a “System that Can Do Anything” and, say, Python? At what point is the user of a system doing capital-P Programming? Is Excel a programming language? What about The Last One? If scratch is a programming language, does clicking around Unreal Engine count? nginx.conf? What about the command-line flags of find?1 And what is it in concrete terms that makes Python better than The Quine Programmer’s monster? The Quine Programmer’s monster.As shown in “The Quine Programmer” on...