Lambda the Ultimate

The ending to the parable on the last page of the paper can be found, for example, at http://philip.greenspun.com/humor/eecs-difference-explained

For people who are interested in Quines, there was a presentation at Eurocrypt last year with an actual application for them. David Naccache gave quite an interesting talk about Quines in time-constrained and space-constrained environments. The punchline is that in some applications you want to download code to a device, but you want to make sure that the device executes the code, rather than simulating it inside a sandbox. One way to do this is to ensure that you have "filled" the device completely so there is no room for an emulator. There is quite a cute method to do this using a quine here. I'd also considered them an entertaining piece of theory, so it was quite suprising to see a (fairly) real application for them.