A fairly long time ago, I stumbled upon William G. Heatley III’s Progranism page that used to reside here (http://www.progranism.com). It has long since gone defunk but after mentioning the idea to a friend of mine he wanted to try them out. After realizing the page no longer existed, I was able to pull the files that used to be on that page from the Internet Wayback Machine

Since I can’t seem to find Mr Heatley’s current information (honestly, I didn’t really try), I will be hosting them here for at least a little. These are the original files I pulled from his site:

progranism-2.1.1.c progranism-2.3.1.c progranism-2.5.1.c (last/current revision) progranism_tools.zip

Now, keep in mind, I haven’t touched these at all recently. They may not compile, they may kill you, etc. Be sure to read up on these things if you do run them. They will almost definitely destroy your machine if your not careful. Run them in a VM, run them in a chroot, run them as a different user who only has access to one directory and so on.

Possible additions to the concept:

• Networking. Just include the required libraries and make sure they link in.
• Sexual vs Asexual reproduction. William originally started with asexual, dabbled with sexual, and then went back to asexual. I don’t know why.
• Write them in assembly so you can distinctly see what’s changing at each generation.
• Put in something to ensure they always get a runable binary out the other end. Maybe cat on the headers outside of the program before they’re run?
• Lots of other stuff that make these things really fun to play with.