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296 points reverseCh | 1 comments | | 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!
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swsieber ◴[] No.41919744[source]
Do ligatures in fonts count? I once modified a monospace font with a ligature that squished 4 spaces down into 3. It was purely for a technical argument of spaces vs tabs to demonstrate that you could indeed have adjustable indent even when using spaces. The fun part was seeing IntelliJ place 4 dots representing spaces even spread over the three space gap :)
replies(1): >>41921244 #
1. callc ◴[] No.41921244[source]
Totally counts. Although the only acceptable setup is one tab followed by 2 spaces per indent :P