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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: 0.25s | 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. GoodJava ◴[23 Oct 24 16:35 UTC] No.41926702[source]▶
I had a hypothesis that any song could be a Christmas song if you just add jingle bells to it. I don't know if I proved that, but I created a website to test it out: http://jinglefy.me

Forgive the lack of SSL certs. It works on chrome if you "Proceed Anyway". I think it has issues on mobile though, and please also forgive the no-longer working Twitter links - I haven't done anything with this site in years!

One unexpected challenge was that, because I encode the entire jingle-bell playback info in the URL parameters, the URLs became very large. So I created my own url shortener (123fwd.me) for use when sharing your jinglefied videos. Here's a jinglefied version of Gangnam Style I created back in the day: http://123fwd.me/16MbXts

After this, I decided to create http://fartify.me based on the same engine. You can probably guess the purpose of this site! :D

Have fun, and I'd love to have you share your own jinglefied or fartified creations here!