What the utter novice finds brilliant and fascinating, the slightly-more-experienced novice finds obvious and boring.<\/p>\n
When you're trying to think of cool things to do with a system, one of the obvious things to try is to abuse self-reference for all the world as if you were Douglas fucking Hofstadter—but it's not cool, precisely because it is so obvious, and you're not Douglas Hofstadter.<\/p>\n
Once I made a Git repository and a Mercurial repository living in the same directory, tracking each other endlessly, one going out of date the moment you committed to the other ...<\/p>\n
But that's not interesting.<\/p>\n
You can run Emacs inside a terminal, and you can run a terminal inside Emacs—in fact, you can run two (M-x term<\/em>, M-x ansi-term<\/em>). Therefore you can run two instances of Emacs within Emacs. Each of those Emacsen could run some natural number of other nested Emacsen, and therefore (to a certain perverse sort of mind) could be said to represent<\/em> that natural number, which I presume could be determined programmatically (via recursion). Two-counter machines are Turing-complete<\/a>. So, in principle, if you didn't run out of memory, you could build a computer out of instances of Emacs running on your computer ...<\/p>\n But that's boring.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What the utter novice finds brilliant and fascinating, the slightly-more-experienced novice finds obvious and boring. When you're trying to think of cool things to do with a system, one of the obvious things to try is to abuse self-reference for … Continue reading