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Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

296 points reverseCh | 4 comments | 20 Oct 24 11:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.449s | source

I recently came across the concept of "useless" programs - pieces of code that serve no practical purpose but are fun, creative, or challenging to write. These could be anything from elaborate ASCII art generators to programs that solve imaginary problems. I'm curious to hear about the most interesting or creative "useless" programs the HN community has written. What was your motivation? What unexpected challenges did you face? Did you learn anything valuable from the experience? Some examples to get the ball rolling: 1. A program that prints the lyrics of "99 Bottles of Beer" in binary. A text-based game where you play as a semicolon trying to find its way to the end of a line of code. A script that translates English text into Shakespearean insults. Share your creations, no matter how quirky or impractical. Let's celebrate the joy of coding for coding's sake!
1. eloisius ◴[20 Oct 24 16:09 UTC] No.41896313[source]▶
About 10 or 11 years ago I wrote a bot that sat in our company Campfire chat training a Markov chain for each person. Then you could command it to imitate someone and it would spit out hilarious madlibs. This would likely not be amusing anymore, but back then it made people laugh.
replies(3): >>41896378 #>>41897528 #>>41920865 #
2. franklin_p_dyer ◴[20 Oct 24 16:17 UTC] No.41896378[source]▶
This is so much fun. I did the same for a Discord server full of philosophy nerds, and the bot would say all sorts of things that started out profound-sounding and ended up absurd (one of our favorites: “I think therefore I am not italian”)
3. mysterydip ◴[20 Oct 24 18:41 UTC] No.41897528[source]▶
I did the same thing with a webchat I made for a bunch of my friends (back before discord was a thing)! Lots of fun.
4. pavel_lishin ◴[23 Oct 24 01:47 UTC] No.41920865[source]▶
I've done this as well, and I keep meaning to re-create it.

The only thing stopping me is that every time I over-engineer the hell out of it, then get annoyed and stop.