I once used the word "quine" in Scrabble. We had a house rule that allowed all English words on English Wiktionary if you could give a more or less correct definition. I gave the computer science definition but it turns out it had a more interesting meaning that immediately caught on in that particular friend group: "To deny the existence or significance of something obviously real or important".
In my third year of university, we had a professor give us an assignment where writing a quine was the final exercise.
For 3 hours, I was cursing his name. Then I got it and I loved him for it. It was such a great feeling!
A quine was something I never would have come up with on my own, and transitioning from "that must be impossible" to "oh, ok it's just ugly" (I did it in Perl iirc) to seeing some elegant ones from classmates was terrific experience.
These kind of thing reminds me of Yusuke Endoh's works. He also made a spinning globe quine, but in Ruby instead of Javascript (referenced in the linked video above near 18:15):
- The array of numbers is essentially a font, defining the numbers 0..9 and lastly ":"
- We pick which character of this font to render based on a Substring of Date(). Either a number, or ":".
- Date()[16] is where the Time string starts, and chars are rendered 8 blocks wide.
- With the beginning `x / 2 % 4 < 3` we render 2 spaces of dark characters between numbers.
- At the end, render our `font` with the x and y coords
- x is divided by two, so all pixels in this font are two characters wide.
- font glyphs are 3x5, and thus defined as 15 bits.
- for example, the glyph for '0' is:
111
101
101
101
111
- which results in 0b111101101101111 and therefor 31599
- To render these characters, we bit shift (<<) the number by the row & col*width and see what value is in the `1` place.
#5 - Coming together
Now just travel the last few steps back up the chain again, and you can see how these characters are placed in `o` - and if `c` is true (we hit a character) it is rendered yellow. `o` is put between a "<script>" and that resulting string is put in document.innerHTML every 100 milliseconds.
Partly because it is not exactly a "proper" quine, which is not allowed to access its own source code in any way. This program uses the fact that JS requires `Function.prototype.toString()` to return something that resembles the original JS source code [1], which can be regarded as reading its own source code (a more precise statement would be that it relies on an implementation-defined behavior though). A proper quine in comparison tends to be longer because it has to repeat itself twice in general.
I get what you are saying about using Function.prototype.toString, I am more fascinated by the coloring according to the datetime string, than by the quine aspect. If it were only about the latter, I agree that it wouldn't be very interesting (or not even a proper quine)
I have no clue what a Quine clock is, but I think it would be easier to read if the diagonal stroke on the front of the 1s only extended to the second row of characters from the top, instead of the third.
I noticed this because it was just 11:11 in my time zone >:)
Of course, search for "js code golf tips" to start. Many tips equally apply to C and JS due to the syntatic similarity, though JS-specific idioms like x|0 exist as well.
[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quine#Verb