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Ask HN: What's the most creative 'useless' program you've ever written?

296 points reverseCh | 2 comments | 20 Oct 24 11:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.407s | 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. stankot ◴[23 Oct 24 14:50 UTC] No.41925629[source]▶
I love creative coding. I'm mostly focused on the visual stuff, especially generating vector files for pen-plotting. That said, I'm very proud of Rayven, my small vector 3D engine that mimics hand hatching:

- https://muffinman.io/blog/sneak-peek-of-rayven/

I would say it is 80% done, but it needs to be polished for a public release. I do plan to release it, and I would love to prepare a proper talk about it.

There are also other small tools I created, like Pulsar (micro creative coding playground) and Vertigo (turning raster images to SVGs). Both are open source and available here:

- https://muffinman.io/pulsar/

- https://muffinman.io/vertigo/

If you liked these, you might want to check my other projects: - https://muffinman.io/projects/

That was a lot of shameless self-promotion, but I love these "useless" projects. They really put fun back into programming after being in the industry for a while. Cheers!

Edit: formatting

replies(1): >>41935992 #
2. sfelicio ◴[24 Oct 24 14:42 UTC] No.41935992[source]▶
That's some very cool art you have there!