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296 points reverseCh | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.207s | 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. jyounker ◴[] No.41925826[source]
I wrote intentionally bad sorting algorithms for a while. One worked by making a random interchange, and then checking to see if the list was sorted. I refer to this as the minimal maximally stupid sort.

You to be inventive to get a sorting algorithm worse than this, but it's quite fun.

I considered writing a book of them called "101 stupid sorts".