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296 points reverseCh | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.616s | 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. thibaut_barrere ◴[] No.41896665[source]
For me it is for instance my involvement in the demo-scene in the 90’s.

A concrete example is Nikki, a demo released in 96 and captured (with some technical difficulties) by a friend here https://youtu.be/t8o-uuq73UU?si=4dlTla0s2mDCVzCK

Working on anything “useless” is profoundly life changing and “useful” on the long run!

Only now am I able to do more similar stuff (my current research is around music + code + lightning and videos, this time connected to real life performances), and it is massively pleasurable (and also likely one of the most technical types of work I will be working on for now!)

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2. Voltage ◴[] No.41919847[source]
Yeah the demoscene jumps out as a good candidate to represent "creative 'useless' programs". :)

I make a few demos, but my personal favourite was this 4k (windows executable less than 4096 bytes):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sBcwQCBpEiE

It uses all the fancy compressing linker tech (called crinkler) along with a tiny music player and a glsl raymarcher.

I tried to download it but all I get is virus warnings now... I guess malware devs also like crinkler. :(