Towards the end of the year, it’s time to relax and look back at what happened the last 12 months. I did quite a few projects that where just fun and had no real use at all. Well, maybe as easter eggs hidden in some serious applications…

Brainfuck compiler

Brainfuck is another programming language invented in Switzerland. And an esoteric one too. Its extreme minimalism makes it hard to write programmes in it, but easy to write a compiler for it. That’s what I have done.

The Brainfuck compiler generates directly executable files in Linux ELF format. Due to the tiny “standard library” of brainfuck, the executables have a nice size (usually a few 100 bytes).

With some time I could support more esoteric programming languages and create elcc: The Esoteric Languages Compiler Collection. We’ll see…

Banners

This one could even be useful. In command line applications or log files, you maybe want to show something very prominently. Using ASCII art banners are a way to achieve this. But if you’re not an artist, creating such banner texts by hand is not a feasible. Big Banners to the rescue!

Emoji Art

Emojis are still hot in 2017. I guess some people cannot communicate without them anymore. On the other hand, ASCII art, the craft of drawing images using only ASCII characters, is a little bit out of fashion. Why not combine the two I asked myself and so emoji-art was born. Technically, it works like this:

  • Scrape the emoji cheat sheet to get a list of emojis and their images.
  • Use the great caca library to generate ASCII art from images.
  • As I’m a java guy and caca is a native library, take libcaca.js, a javascript port of caca (thanks emscripten!) and run this inside JVM’s own javascript engine.

Sounds horrible, but works. And the best thing is: Because it’s javascript, this works also directly on a web page without JVM. That’s great for demos.

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Firetop

In a certain project, there were issues with hardware getting too hot, almost burning. So the system engineers had to have a regular look at top to see if there’s too much CPU load. During a coffee break, someone had the idea to combine burning hardware with the top command and so, firetop was born.

Swear in swiss german

In another coffee break chat, someone found this nice site where you can let yourself insult in swiss german. I wanted an offline, command line version of this and started by scraping all texts from this site. It was great fun and I kept adding things so in the end, swiss wowbagger

  • contains more than 500 urchige words with a huge number of possible combinations
  • adjusts adjectives to the gender of the subject (had to learn some swiss german grammer for that!)
  • is a Kotlin - multiplatform project that compiles to JVM bytecode as well as to javascript
  • is still great fun

Läck Jänu, du aagchaflete fautsche PHP-Programmierer, hantli is Bett!

More ideas

There are more ideas, but with only sketchy implementations:

  • The Breakout game in the terminal
  • A simple C64 emulator in the terminal that could be used for scripting and other fun
  • Animations in the browser’s address bar
  • A movie quiz based on the hashtag #MovieLinesInCode

Happy and inspired new year 2018!