Because you are time-sharing, there is a strong disincentive to writing complex (long loop) programs. You have to scan for enemy programs, and throughput is imp

Because you are time-sharing, there is a strong disincentive to writing complex (long loop) programs. You have to scan for enemy programs, and throughput is important there. So unfortunately it doesn't get very deep. I suppose you could make it more interesting by battling it out on real systems, a mix of Core War and CTF if you like. Fortunately there are other programming games such as Robocode, Screeps, yare.io, etc.