Z. M. Davis: All this talk of "simpler computer program" seems pretty meaningless to me. A regex matcher in C is long and complex, but in PHP all you have to do is use the built-in preg_match function. (Does the language the universe was written in have a built-in copenhagen_interpretation function?)

One might claim that PHP is a more complicated language than C, but how is that measured? The only way to see how complicated a language is is by a complete description of it - an implementation. And the complexity of an implementation depends on the kind of CPU it must run on, and the complexity of a CPU architecture depends on the laws of physics it must exist in. Self reference: this is the stuff paradoxes are made of.