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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: 0.207s | 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. Traubenfuchs ◴[23 Oct 24 05:34 UTC] No.41922116[source]▶
I have written a comfort and ux feature rich winforms application that is a completely borderless image viewer named ComfyViewer. You can move the images you opened around as you desire, ignoring any bounds of the screen and without resize limits. The window is also borderless! I reimplemented the whole resize logic from scratch with the windows api. Additionally it puts the image in its window thumbnail. It really was my winforms mastery project.

The thing is I really like to goon, especially to still images of a certain topic, like bearded, muscular red haired men. That‘s why I need a „collage“ of still images, maximising window flexibility and minimising waste of screen space to enhance the pleasure.

It has a „close all“ button, so you don‘t need to go hunt down the 4, 6, 8, 10? windows of images you finished with.