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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: 0.325s | 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. AStonesThrow ◴[23 Oct 24 07:35 UTC] No.41922722[source]▶
I only finished college on the fifth attempt, so I had a number of incidents of dropping out.

On my second attempt, I was enrolled in community college, in only two classes: math and an Advanced C Programming course. I intensely disliked the math course, mostly because all the students seemed either apathetic, cheating, or both.

Anyway, the Advanced C course was fun: I already had some intermediate C skills by that time (1991 or so), and so I was doing great. The final project for us was to design and write an ASCII to EBCDIC converter. By this time, of course, we had no practical use for documents in EBCDIC, but it was a fairly straightforward programming problem.

I decided to be a hotshot, and in addition to the normal program I was turning in, I wrote an Obfuscated C version. I did enlist outside help by another expert I knew online. We did some really "sick and twisted" things to compress the code down, and make it really confusing. It was the most fun I had in a programming class.

I'll always remember that episode, and I wish I still had a copy of the code around, to keep in my portfolio!