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296 points reverseCh | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.217s | 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. relwin ◴[] No.41922017[source]
Way back in the 80's I synchronized the clocks on 3 IBM PCs (originals w/5151 green monitors) in the computer lab and ran a simple digital clock program on each, showing hours:min:sec across the 3 in glorious PC text graphics. After awhile I noticed about a dozen students standing around the 3 PCs -- they were waiting for the time to roll from 7:59:59 to 8:00:00, perfectly synchronized like magic! (Remember no networks back then!) I found this pretty funny...