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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: 0.202s | 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. daemon_9009 ◴[29 Oct 24 18:22 UTC] No.41987746[source]▶
Hi guys, I made a completely multiplayer programming game for C++ and python, started it to learn graphics, multithreading and all. ended up creating a small game engine for my game (included a lot of game maths), learnt multithreading and multiprocessing deeply. the game is originally programmed in c++, so had to do everything from scratch. Later ported it to python using pyBind11, wrote the langauge bindings for python. For the multiplayer part, which took the most of the time, ended up creating my own networking protocol( over UDP) according to the game needs. you can see the project here at my website: https://aiplaygrounds.in