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

41 points reverseCh | 2 comments | 20 Oct 24 11:56 UTC | HN request time: 0s | 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. simonsarris ◴[20 Oct 24 16:40 UTC] No.41896595[source]▶
I like inserting art, like the header to https://simonsarris.com

A village pops up. There is no point to it. You can click to make more houses. You can right-click to drag things around. When I touch it again I think I'll add a sun and moon that track the time of day for wherever the user is located. Actually the footer has art too, each page has a semi-randomly assigned illustration from public-domain (old) art that I've found. Like drawings from James McNeill Whistler, for instance. I use his illustrations in 'useful' websites too.

Actually, I experimented with the sun/moon a few years ago, in this version: https://simonsarris.github.io/simeville/

If you left-click drag the sun downwards, you'll see the moon come up. That one is open source, but the code is quite slapdash compared to the new one. Also you have to click ITS TIME TO BUILD to get the buildings.

In general I think websites could be a lot more pretty (gorgeous even), silly, interesting, and a lot less corporate chic than they currently are.

replies(1): >>41897108 #
2. sshine ◴[20 Oct 24 17:45 UTC] No.41897108[source]▶
I like having this kind of animation on my homepage, too.

Currently I just have an animated GIF background, but I've had some animated ASCII art in the past.

I'm currently working on animating a fractal drawn with HTML Canvas.

Your houses and pencil style are very cute, I feel inspired to make something similar.

I'd like if clicking in the same place would grow whatever's there.