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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: 0.208s | 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!
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thetomcraig ◴[23 Oct 24 11:51 UTC] No.41924015[source]▶
In college, I had an internship at JPL writing software to help collate, transform, and combine pictures of Jupiter, for use with NASA’s JUNO mission.

My coworker and I created a GUI application in IDL (similar to FORTRAN), that would allow the user to open up several images of various wavelengths and combine them into a cylindrical map of the planet, showing its entire surface at a given point in time. After working on this for several months and creating a functional, and actually useful program, we realize that there was a blank space in the toolbar and we had no button that needed to be there. So we put in a button with a cat GIF that literally did nothing. We planned on having it do something jokey, but ran out of time.

I will always remember demoing this to my mentor, basically the world expert on all things Jupiter, showing him what the program did, thus justifying why JPL had spent several thousand dollars to have me as a research fellow. The disappointment in his eyes when he saw that dumb, useless, cat button was priceless.

replies(2): >>41925582 #>>41925619 #
1. wing-_-nuts ◴[23 Oct 24 14:49 UTC] No.41925619[source]▶
>The disappointment in his eyes when he saw that dumb, useless, cat button was priceless.

I once wrote a p2p filesharing app in college for a networking class, and I had put an easter egg in there where if you requested a certain file (lenin.jpg?) it displayed ascii art of a communism meme and started playing a midi of the soviet national anthem.

My little old networking prof sets down to test my program, and of course, that's the file she requested. She slowly turns to me, looks me in the eye and says 'be honest, you spent more time on that than the actual assignment didn't you?' ...'yes'. She shakes her head and mutters 'nerds!' under her breath, lmao