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“Self-modifying code...” used to be a phrase always uttered (by us hackers) with tones of both admiration and dread. Admiration, because there are stories from the earliest days of the stored program computer of how impossibly clever programmers would make their code flip state with perfect grace, simply by modifying (as data) an instruction it was about to execute. Dread, because when we tried the graceful flip on our own, the usual result was... less graceful. Painful, actually. Yet many of us all have a self-modifying code story, somewhere back in time, that we view with pride, perhaps like the bowler’s perfect game, or the golfer’s hole-in-one.