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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: 0.202s | 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. rikroots ◴[23 Oct 24 07:37 UTC] No.41922731[source]▶
This code[1] takes a Gevey[2] phrase (eg: Ganexlje tots qibate vuiteerjat, yu vaelaem vosubz djaont nexljate veihat. Ûdx leugxoisqeu veihakjeu seti, sneinov galeugxe árj mondz dxeute tadiljt.[3]) and turns it into a string of letters that can be displayed by my Gevey native script font[4] in a browser.

[1] - https://github.com/KaliedaRik/gevey-2023/blob/main/src/lib/n...

[2] - My constructed language. I started working on it after my first week of French lessons, at which point I decided: "I can build a better language than that!" - 50 years later I'm still working on it and, no, it's not better than French ... yet.

[3] - The builders worked very quickly, they easily built a bridge over the river. Travelling is easier now, but not enough travellers stop here anymore.

[4] - https://github.com/KaliedaRik/gevey-2023/blob/main/static/fo...