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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: 0.271s | 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. throwaway313373 ◴[23 Oct 24 01:15 UTC] No.41920612[source]▶
I once had an idea of turning Conway's Life into music, but never finished it. I wanted to make it interactive but never figured out how to make it user friendly. Also, I haven't figured out how to use audio compressor in browser, so some positions were clipping very hard.

So I left it in the state where the only thing you can do is to listen to ten descending gliders and that's it :)

Surprisingly, it still works, except now you have to click/tap anywhere on the screen to make the sound play. I think that 9 years ago browsers didn't have this feature and allowed sound to play right away.

Here is the link (CAREFUL, can be VERY LOUD): https://vovanz.github.io/conways_live_music/