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296 points reverseCh | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.201s | 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. jburgy ◴[] No.41924848[source]
Many years ago, I wondered how Ken Thompson's 1968 ACM article on implementing regexes in IBM 7040 would look in x86. Ken uses two lists for current and next backtracking and I replaced one of them by the call stack (interleaving call and ret in weird order). I remember struggling with some assembly syntax (AXC **,7 as it were) so I emailed Mr. Thompson! And Ken, ever the gentleman, took ample time to reply to a no-name n00b! Several years later, Russ Cox of Go fame somehow heard about my silly hack, reached out, and included it on his page about "Implementing Regular Expressions" (https://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/).