←back to thread

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

41 points reverseCh | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 11:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.24s | 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!
Show context
chubot ◴[20 Oct 24 16:15 UTC] No.41896364[source]▶
I learned in college Geometry class that you can transform a square to an equilateral triangle in 11 cuts or so

So I wrote a matlab program to draw the shapes, and cut them out, and it works

It’s mathematically exact, not just approximate

Still surprises me after 20 years, so I want to find this old program again lol

replies(2): >>41896417 #>>41897664 #
chubot ◴[20 Oct 24 16:20 UTC] No.41896417[source]▶
This got a downvote and I wonder if it’s from a person who doesn’t think it’s true
replies(2): >>41896494 #>>41903627 #
1. Someone ◴[21 Oct 24 12:52 UTC] No.41903627[source]▶
It more likely s from a person whose fingers are much larger than the distance between the up/downvote triangles on their device (that’s about everybody)