Uroboros Programming With 11 Programming Languages

asiajin.com

50 points·dfreidin··10 comments

I was not all that impressed until I saw the size of the original source code, dang.

What fascinated about this article is that there's a whole other world out there of geeks/programmers/hackers beyond our English speaking world doing their own things and sharing their own ideas.

The reddit crowd shares you fascination and expresses itself eloquently:

http://d.hatena.ne.jp/ku-ma-me/20090916/p1#c1254244804

For a Theory of Computation class I had as a part of the homework to write a program that writes itself in one programming language. It is amazing that such programs exists that can switch languages and can go through several methamorphoses

Someone has way too much time on their hands.

I'd like to have that much time on my hands too.

That is pretty cool but really, could whoever wrote that not have spent however long that took (which I'm guessing is quite long) doing something a lot more worthwhile.

That's so cold. And un-inquisitive.

That's like saying to new parents - "Wow, this kid you have for yourself, that's pretty cool; but really - could you not have wasted your time with that and build a business instead?"

doing something a lot more worthwhile.

This is narrow minded. The same thing could be said about most any of the great thinkers of history... specifically those in Mathematics since it's so abstract. Arguably programming like this is closer to Math than hacking industry software.

There are of course a handful of exceptions like Benjamin Franklin who tended to be pragmatic. And there is nothing wrong about only being productive in a way that is economically quantitative. But I think there should be room for both.

I think you are right and wish I could take back what I said now. :-)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com