Its not sad at all. Really good programmers can do things that ordinary programmers think impossible. This code was probably generated. Here is a paper on quine

Its not sad at all. Really good programmers can do things that ordinary programmers think impossible. This code was probably generated. Here is a paper on quine generation[1], and the authors have a very popular talk where they livecode a quine generator; that is, they livecode a program that generates an infinite list of quines[2] (source code from talk [3]). [1] http://users-cs.au.dk/danvy/sfp12/papers/byrd-holk-friedman-paper-sfp12.pdf http://users-cs.au.dk/danvy/sfp12/papers/byrd-holk-friedman-... [2] http://www.infoq.com/presentations/miniKanren http://www.infoq.com/presentations/miniKanren [3] https://github.com/webyrd/quines https://github.com/webyrd/quines The talk is amazing and hilarious. On point, if the code is not generated in this fashion, there is assuredly a "work smart not hard" trick that drastically simplifies the problem.