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Probably inspired by my comment earlier [1] about how Linus comitted the first version of git in git [2].

I find it fascinating that systems can be bootstrapped upon their own foundations.

[1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3277079

[2] - http://git.kernel.org/?p=git/git.git;a=commit;h=e83c5163316f...

I guess the canonical example is using a compiler to compile its next version. Ken Thompson famously used this bootstrapping property to insert a trojan horse into the C compiler [1]. It propagated itself into future binary versions of the compiler, without actually appearing in their source code.

[1] http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ken/trust.html

Ken explained it was possible to write such a trojan but he never did it.

One of the coolest cases of this I've seen recently is the second half of Kent Beck's "Test Driven Development: By Example". He uses builds a TDD framework with TDD, using the TDD framework he's building.

funnily, I was revisiting the TDD sudoku incident recently... ;)

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