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

296 points reverseCh | 3 comments | 20 Oct 24 11:56 UTC | HN request time: 0.612s | 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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kmoser ◴[23 Oct 24 02:09 UTC] No.41921030[source]▶
Speaking of "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" I wrote a version for Prodigy when I worked there in the 1990s, using their proprietary language named PAL: http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/language-PAL-528.html

It never appeared publicly on Prodigy, of course, but it was fun to run on my dev computer.

Also in the early 1990s I wrote a command-line program to generate anagrams. I spent a ton of time on it, adding all sorts of features and optimizations, and used it to find some really interesting anagrams of celebrities: https://www.kmoser.com/anagrams/

replies(1): >>41925905 #
1. prometheus76 ◴[23 Oct 24 15:16 UTC] No.41925905[source]▶
What anagrams does it produce for "Jeremy Irons"?
replies(1): >>41925925 #
2. kmoser ◴[23 Oct 24 15:18 UTC] No.41925925[source]▶
You can download the binary and run it in a DOS emulator to find out! Or compile from the source linked to on the page.
replies(1): >>41944503 #
3. prometheus76 ◴[25 Oct 24 12:17 UTC] No.41944503[source]▶
I will check it out, but it was a reference to an old Simpsons joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhmtXpWsAdU