# Yusuke Endoh ("mame")

> The Ruby committer who turns the language into playful art: quines, spinning globes, and a contest for the weirdest programs imaginable.

**Yusuke Endoh**, known everywhere as **mame**, is a member of the team that builds Ruby itself, where by his own description he works on "bug fixes, test maintenance and release engineering." He is also the community's resident maker of joyful, useless, beautiful things. He calls himself a "Quine programmer," and a quine is a program whose only job is to print out its own source code exactly, a kind of self-portrait in code.

His quines are famous for going far past the trick itself into genuine art. **Quine Relay** is a Ruby program that prints a program in another language, which prints a program in yet another language, and so on all the way around a loop of more than 100 languages until the very last one prints the original Ruby again (the repository describes a chain of 128 languages). He also made **the Qlobe**, a quine with a slowly spinning globe drawn inside it, and a **Piet Quine** written in an esoteric language where programs look like abstract paintings. Away from Ruby he is a decorated competitor in the International Obfuscated C Code Contest, and describes himself simply as "World No.1 IOCCC player."

He also runs **TRICK**, the **Transcendental Ruby Imbroglio Contest for RubyKaigi**, an occasional contest for the most surprising, delightful, and gloriously impractical Ruby programs people can write. Entries have to be real, working Ruby, and the goal is simply to "surprise, excite, or amuse the judges." The judging panel has included mame alongside Ruby's creator, [Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/matz.md), himself. It is Ruby at its most playful: proof that a serious language can also be a place to make people smile.

*Related:* [Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/matz.md) · [Koichi Sasada](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/koichi-sasada.md) · [Nobuyoshi Nakada](https://chunkybacon.dev/people/nobuyoshi-nakada.md)

## Sources
- Uses This interview (Yusuke Endoh, self-description as Ruby developer and quine programmer, Qlobe, Piet Quine): https://usesthis.com/interviews/yusuke.endoh/
- Yusuke Endoh on GitHub (@mame, "World No.1 IOCCC player"): https://github.com/mame
- Quine Relay (chain of 128 languages that loops back to the original Ruby): https://github.com/mame/quine-relay
- TRICK 2022 (full contest name, rules, judging panel including Matz): https://github.com/tric/trick2022

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Source: https://chunkybacon.dev/people/yusuke-endoh/
License: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)