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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: 0.228s | 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. charles_f ◴[23 Oct 24 14:28 UTC] No.41925380[source]▶
When I was in university, with a friend we wrote stack++, which was using stacks to do everything. Stack strings, stack numbers, stack operators, etc. We only give you two stacks per type. You would define your program using long string that would stack all of your stuff into stacks, then it starts unstacking the operators-1 stack, and you're on your own.

It was of course completely pointless, but to this day I regularly go back my stack of old hard drives and cd backups to see if I can find back the source code.