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296 points reverseCh | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.205s | 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. ja27 ◴[] No.41926115[source]
This wasn't super creative, but way back in time, I was on a local tinymud and a number of us starting writing bot NPCs for it. I built a bartender bot that eventually would remember drinks, tell jokes, and more. One day another bot came into the bar and got into an extended exchange of insults with the bartender bot. We were kind of dumbfounded watching these blocks of switch statements have a very real-looking conversation in front of us.