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41 points reverseCh | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.203s | 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. rapjr9 ◴[] No.41909608[source]
I used to write very short programs for the Amiga that would scan through all the pixels on the screen and assign a color to them based on whatever math functions I felt like writing. They took hours, sometimes days to run, but the results were often interesting, sometimes radial gradients, sometimes random noise, sometimes things that looked like musical notes on a random background. Then I'd load a color table and color cycle the resulting image. Sometimes this created movement in the image, sometimes it animated the noise so it looked like old-fashioned TV static. Just did it for fun, only took a few minutes to write the code, and sometimes the results were great. It was often very difficult to predict what the final image would look like, unless I started with a program I'd run before.