Champion coder Yusuke Endoh has been flexing their esoteric programming muscles on social media. Their latest confection is a Piet Quine – a GIF image that prints itself. In other words, the GIF is both the code and the precise result after running the code.
If you haven’t quite grasped the enormity of this feat from the title, it is worth breaking down the respective definitions of both Piet and Quine in a computer programming context. Piet is an esoteric programming language in which programs look like complex, colorful, tiled artwork. Inventor David Morgan-Mar named it after Piet Mondrian, the famous founder of the neoplasticism artistic movement. Such artwork is immediately recognizable with its bold squares and rectangles bordered by heavy black lines. Smaller Piet GIFs look a bit more Mondrian-y to me, but also look more like colorful QR codes than paintings.
