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296 points reverseCh | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.205s | 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. rerdavies ◴[] No.41921509[source]
A DOS screensaver that would convert the current text buffer to EGA graphics equivalent, after which animated ants would crawl out from the edge of the screen and gradually eat the text. The ants were programmed to follow randomly generated paths, but would tend to follow tightly looped paths when they had recently fed, but follow paths with a longer loop when they were "hungry", in order to help them find the last fragments of text left on the screen - a very primitive and early form of Artificial Intelligence.

Regrettable written in the pre-internet age when there was no clear and obvious way to share such precious and beautiful things with millions of users.