Code That Pushed the Language Envelope?

Lil Fritz asks: "Following on from the cool Flash Adventure game last week, this geezer Neil Pearce has written a full client side JavaScript CPU chess player (which drew with me, but then I'm papz at Chess). Now this sort of thing always amazes me. Doing stuff for which it was never intended. Do we have other warped (ie 'they wrote it in what?!?') uses of languages and tools?"

Comments

Not too good

[Scarblac]

The site says it looks 2 moves deep, but I don't see how it can play like this then:

1.e4 Nc6 2.d4 Nf6 3.e5 Ne4 4.Bd3 Nxd4?? 5.Bxe4 Nxc2?? 6.Qxc2

Leaving two knights hanging to immediate capture threats, that doesn't suggest any lookahead to me.

But of course, it's neat that it works. People have made utilities for playing through chess games before, like PalView (a simple demo here).

Adapting that to take user input and a very simple lookahead is work, but not stunning in my opinion. Unless there's some reason why this is very hard in JS, I don't really do that language...

Its kind of cool - but...

[Dukebytes]

This sort of stuff is neat - but it also makes you want to go eh?? WTF??

I know, I know - its just a little game to see if they could do it. But geesh - I see this stuff in the OFFICE all the time. Some of the devs do stuff in java, some in VB, some in perl etc... What I hate to see is when someone is so wrapped up in VB, or java, or any language that they WILL NOT write anything in any other code.

A few of the VB guys, they push it to the extreme, and are zelots about it. Sometimes I actually think they believe they are making the world a better place because they write in VB....

This is cool, but man, it happens all the time and not always for the right reasons.

Duke