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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: 0.206s | 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. JohnScolaro ◴[23 Oct 24 01:03 UTC] No.41920516[source]▶
I'm predominantly a backend Python Web developer, and I implemented a match 3 engine in Pygame.

See example gifs on my blog here: https://johnscolaro.xyz/blog/pygame-match-3

When I say "match3", I don't mean "candy crush" style, I mean more like "YMBAB" or "chuzzle style".

The main learning I had was how much more "stateful" a game is vs something like the backend of a webserver. I'm used to writing code with no/few side effects, but when you're juggling 50+ gems in different states of falling/idle/ exploding, different frames of animation, and different states of user input, it made me thing differently about state, testing, and probably exposed me a little to the problems gave devs grapple with day-to-day.

I have a lot more respect for the original creators of these slightly modified match 3 games like "Chuzzle".