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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: 0.207s | 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. mrimn ◴[27 Oct 24 10:35 UTC] No.41961402[source]▶
10+ years ago, a large corporation ran a smallish web-shop for their B2B segment with just about 20 articles. So one would expect the front-page of this shop, listing like 10 products, should be perfectly quick. OK, it wasn't. Reason was a strange policy that required this particular PHP based CMS/shop system to run on a Oracle database (for wich it definitely was not optimized). As moving to e.g. MySQL was denied, we needed to get creative.

In the end my "useless" program was curl or wget, executed by a cronjob to fetch that web-shop to render the front-page over and over again every few minutes to keep the caches of the application warm, resulting in "acceptable" load-times around 10s instead of 50 or more seconds.

Customer got a quick and rather cheap solution for his problem.

Fun fact: This cronjob was not just a hotfix for a few days but rather stayed in active duty for more than 5 years before the shop was finally replaced with a proper solution...