Show HN: Quinesnake – A quine that plays snake over its own source (opens in new tab)

So it’s not just a quine, but a polyglot quine even. They are the best :)

Not exactly. It prints exactly it's own source code as output but it doesn't run it again. You can run a quine output manually as it's by definition the same code that printed it but it lacks the ability to keep executing continuously like a worm virus would require. I guess you could make a worm virus that's also a quine but that would be a whole other problem.

Oh that sucks, the whole point of programs like these is that they should still be portable. Could you make a GitHub issue (or email me) with your platform, shell, compiler version and curses version?

Unfortunately it's a pretty manual, tedious and frustrating process, especially when the code is minified and you want to squeeze it into as small a source file as possible.

A generic (pseudo) quine is:

   s = "print escape(s)\n{payload}"
   print "s = "
   print escape(s)
   {payload}

So if you wanna do extra stuff on top of being a quine, just write that program and bootstrap with escape()

We don’t do this, that and the other thing because they are easy, we do it because they are hard.

The tedium is part of the difficulty. Making it easier is not inspirational. Although buildings the tooling to do so would itself be quite the challenge ...