There have been few really important problems that have had the beautiful opportunity to recursively fix or use itself. A great example it a project at work called zody, it is a bug tracking system. After a week of development, it was able to be running well enough to keep track of its own bugs and the feature requests of others.
Richard Stallman wrote GCC the GNU C Compiler from scratch. He was able to compile his compiler ( with a previous version ) and it has been used to compile the next generation of versions from that point on.
Notable Recursive Stuff:
- The term GNU is a recursive acronym for “GNU’s Not Unix!”.
- Git – After only a couple days, git source control had it’s own repository to maintain its own source code.
- Subversion – Source Control System, maintains its own code
- SharpDevelop – C# development program – written in C# , runs on .Net Framework, to write code for the .Net Framework.
- Emacs - A text editor that was used to write itself ( the source text )
Today I deployed some new software, that is designed to deploy other software to servers. So we naturally used it to deploy itself. It was really cool, and I had a big smile on my face, when it happened.
[...] helped on getting me into the minimalist mentality. I was working on my 100 item list, and listed my notebook and pen as the first two items. I’ve found myself working out problems by hand, rather than [...]
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