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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: 0.207s | 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. rocheio ◴[23 Oct 24 01:23 UTC] No.41920674[source]▶
> anything from elaborate ASCII art generators to programs that solve imaginary problems

I did a little of both with https://asciitabs.com/random - trying to learn some basic music theory and improvisation with guitar and thought maybe this would be a good way to help out.

Actually WRITING the program did indeed help memorize the spacing of notes and general pattern of scales. But it was one of those "write it to throw away" moments where now that I have written it... well it's fun to look back at and click a few times!

But I have to chuckle in hindsight to think that the way to "improvise on a guitar in a way that sounds good" is anything other than just hours and hours of practice