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296 points reverseCh | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.251s | 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. aimor ◴[] No.41921134[source]
I wrote a kaleidoscope simulator. You know, a virtual tray filled with hundreds of little plastic beads of various shapes and colors that tumble around when you press the keys, with the camera displayed on a grid of triangles. I wrote it in Rust using Bevy, which was great, but it wouldn't work in WASM for some reason (simpler projects did just fine) and getting it running in the browser was the goal so I uh dropped the project.