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

296 points reverseCh | 1 comments | 20 Oct 24 11:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.2s | 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. jim_lawless ◴[22 Oct 24 23:27 UTC] No.41919825[source]▶
I like to write a lot of little programming interpreters and compilers that don't have a whole lot of purpose other than to experiment with a concept. One of these was a little language I called Triad ... an esoteric programming language that used three-letter identifiers because I could quickly treat them like a base-26 int and index an array of 17576 entries, avoiding having to use a hash table implementation.

You can see the C source code for a simple command interpreter that permits three-letter subroutine identifiers here.

https://github.com/jimlawless/triad

I have some other versions that had placeholders for built-in operations that would have made the language Turing-complete but I soon lost interest.

I also implemented a little BASIC interpreter that was only complete enough to write a BASIC program to display the lyrics for the 12 Days of Christmas song:

https://github.com/jimlawless/lazybasic