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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: 0.203s | 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. msephton ◴[23 Oct 24 02:35 UTC] No.41921197[source]▶
Little projects like this are what keep me going. These days this sort of creative effort goes into the games I make, but in years gone by:

favemoji (2017) - a Safari extension to add emoji to the site title because Safari didn't (doesn't? I forget) show favicons in tabs.

Inbox Zero Fanfare (2013) - played the Macintosh trumpet sound effect when you reached inbox zero in Gmail. I was as much proud of the icon as the code: https://twitter.com/gingerbeardman/status/177626190098190342...

Bender (2012) - a game made using only CSS transitions (and a tiny bit of JavaScript to manage game state). I recently released a remake for Playdate handheld, both here: https://blog.gingerbeardman.com/2024/10/08/bender-2-bend-har...

Speak Lolcat (2007) - English to Lolcat translator, based on fairly simple heuristics, took me 30 minutes and made some nice Google ad revenue. It's still up! https://speaklolcat.com