Hi, all, I just wanted to post this on the #community channel because I’m not really going for technical content, just anecdotal discussion/opinion:
Anyone working on a personal project and you don’t even know why you bother, but it’s just entertaining to do? All but one of my projects have a purpose (whether they actually serve that purpose is a different story ) , but I have one where I cannot define exactly what it does or what it’s for. It’s almost like “programming art” in that it doesn’t fulfill an actual need.
Curious if others do stuff like that or if I’m just weird!
I have a project that I first wrote for work in Fortran back in 1995. It was the only way to process large datasets with limited memory - 2 megabytes of memory - because the compiler had a memory manager, meaning it would swap data to disk, and because Fortran doesn’t allocate memory until it’s acutally used.
Anyway, zoom ahead to 2005 and I rewrote the whole thing in C++. It ran about 1000x faster. I am retired now so all of my projects are “recreational”. In the last few years, I’ve take a couple of routines from the project and tried them in Clojure, Python, C, Haskell, and now Go. I’ve decided to rewrite the whole project in Go. Now, I have two reasons for doing this.
Firstly, I’m going to make the whole thing Open Source when I’m done. This is a geophysical data processing system which is going to really piss off some geophysical consulting companies. And secondly, I want to use the experience to learn how to program in Go, follow the Git SVC process, and Test Driven Development.
But apart from that, I can’t really justify writing the program again when I have a perfectly good version running already.
Hi! I made some telegram bots in Go.
The first one is not so useless, it monitors Italian daily pandemic data and sends graphs and comparisons.
After this one (which is the biggest thing I’ve ever written in Go i think), I made other two telegram bots which speak like two “particular” people famous in Italian YouTube Poops (and yeah, if you’re thinking about it, they are not about spaghetti, the only thing like spaghetti is my first bot code at the moment).
I also wrote a useless file integrity checker which checks if two files are identical (after a copy for example). This is probably the most useless thing over all my projects, because I could just use rsync to accomplish this task.
Anyway, yes, sometimes I do things without sense, too.
) , but I have one where I cannot define exactly what it does or what it’s for. It’s almost like “programming art” in that it doesn’t fulfill an actual need.