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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. ajb ◴[23 Oct 24 09:48 UTC] No.41923439[source]▶
I devised a grammar for arithmetic expressions which is less readable than either standard or RPN notation.

Basically, an arithmetic expression is a tree. Standard notation indicates the shape of the tree with brackets, RPN by listing the nodes in the order of a particular tree walk. My notation visually indicates whether each node is connected on the right or left. Examples:

Standard: 1+2

RPN: 1 2 +

Tree: 1'+`2

Standard: 1*(2+3)

RPN: 1 2 3 + *

Tree: 1'*2'`+`3

It looks a bit nicer if ' and ` are mirror images in the font you are using, but it's still not very readable. I did hope that you could leave the tags off leaves and only put them on operators, but this isn't sufficient to make each tree shape unique.

The idea was just to find something visually interesting*