If dried cactus was easier to procure than fresh, I expect one would settle on a different approach entirely - and I'm sure these cacti are every bit as useful dry as they are wet
Cactophage is a self-modifying program written mostly in Common Lisp. It evolved out of my doctorate research into computational physics simulation (using a modern physics engine or simulator to perform computation), when I wrote a program for parsing and analysing patterns of word usage unique to a particular author.
It should be obvious, but don't take anything it says too seriously. Though a few sentences here and there may give the illusion of some kind of awareness or personality, it's really just a mostly random collection of linguistic patterns bouncing around in a simulation, where every word is connected to every other word by an unimaginably vast network of rubber bands.