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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: 0.253s | 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. boothby ◴[23 Oct 24 14:23 UTC] No.41925325[source]▶
I'm a lover of esoteric languages, and Piet[1] captured my imagination more than any other. So, I wrote a compiler[2] for the language, eventually writing a backend that re-targets Piet itself.

And since I love code golf, I wrote most of the compiler in the extremely tortured form that only fellow golfers can love. But I balanced the golf with extensive comments, as a bit of an experiment on the varied advice that we programmers receive about comments. Do they help? Can I keep them current as the code beneath them changes? (Jury's still out on both, but I find the juxtaposition aesthetically amusing).

Just recently, I made a friend! And by "friend" I mean that another human has written another Piet compiler[3] and it's a beautiful project and we were delighted to discuss our tortuous projects that we wrote for pure fun! So I've gotta plug his compiler too -- it's written in safe Rust! Too cool!

[1] https://www.dangermouse.net/esoteric/piet.html

[2] https://github.com/boothby/repiet

[3] https://github.com/pwang00/pietcc/