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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: 0.355s | 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. marc_abonce ◴[23 Oct 24 02:24 UTC] No.41921137[source]▶
react-lang-selecta: https://github.com/MarcAbonce/react-lang-selecta

A language selector component that shows random (but still accurate) flags for each given language.

So if you give it, for example: English, Portuguese and Chinese it might render the flags of South Sudan, Macau, and Macau.

I always noticed how websites sometimes pick arbitrary flags in their language dropdowns even when they're not even trying to represent those specific regions. Wikipedia even has an article describing this topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_icons_for_languages

So I thought about making a React component lib just to make fun of that idea. It's not that creative nor good but I had fun writing it.