To a programmer it's reminiscent of a self-hosting compiler that comes with working source and binary, but not the sequence of bootstraps. "Trusting trust" make

To a programmer it's reminiscent of a self-hosting compiler that comes with working source and binary, but not the sequence of bootstraps. "Trusting trust" makes a nice example of the hastiness in taking the source to be all you really need to know. Similarly, metacircular interpreters that leave evaluation order ambiguous. Should be very interesting to quantify what's needed for a "clean bootstrap" of a minimal model organism that can reproduce.