The Quine – i.e., a program that produces its own source code as output – lives in the esoteric realm of computing and computer science. It’s almost entirely useless, but usually pretty fun. The Quine Programmer, on the other hand, is among the pantheon of programming gods, sitting between The Great Abstractor and The PHP God.

The Quine Programmer has the uncanny gifts of being infinitely good at programming and infinitely insightful, thus allowing him to write a program to replace himself and all other programmers. The output of The Quine Programmer is system that’s fully configurable by the end-user; should the end-user want something changed, she can simply change it herself.

Of course, “can” and “will” are two separate concepts, and oftentimes the end-user of such a system will rely on others for such a change. Willy is one of those “others”, and he often finds himself wondering why the end-user just doesn’t change the logic herself. After all, their system was built by The Quine Programmer himself, and is therefore easily changeable.

Willy also finds himself wondering how he ended up as a “programmer” of a system that clearly needs no “programming” and how long it will take for him to find a new job. He’s hoping it’s before he’s tasked with modifying one of the “complex” workflows.

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