One of my old projects, FOUR FOUR, contains a list of every four-letter English word. I just grabbed this word list from some random website back in 2012, and it was full of obscure words that didn’t combo well and other garbage. So, the other day, I decided to read through the list and trim it down to just the good stuff. I was partway through the process when I realized… it’d be pretty dang silly if I streamed myself reading and pruning this massive list of words. So…
So that went well. It went weird, which is well.
The final list ended up with almost exactly 2222 words. I added a few that were weirdly missing (like “Hest”), and removed some names (because names aren’t silly).
So then I wondered… how quickly could you read this list of words?
What if I wrote a program that’d pop the words up as fast as I could say them?
How long would it take to read all of them?
Well, I could read a word every half second or so. 2222 ÷ 120 words per minute… comes out to… tantalizingly close to 22 minutes and 22 seconds.
And the code needed to read the list of words and show them one-at-a-time is suuuuper simple.
And the rest just flowed naturally from there.
The code is soooo simple!
I could imagine writing this program whenever I learn a new language. Like, first you do Hello World, then you do 2222. It’d be like TodoMVC but as an absurdist game.
So… I made that too.
2222
“Two Twenty-Two Two” is a game 🎲
for people 🫣 who like to be silly
and know a tiny 🤏 bit of programming.
The idea is that anyone who wants to play the game should first implement it themselves in a programming language of their choosing, then play the game, then share their code or a recording of them playing.
So far, a few days after creating the game, people have contributed implementations in AppleScript, awk, bash, gleam, haskell, html, perl, python, rust, scratch, and xargs!
Nobody has done a stream or recording of themselves actually playing the game yet, though. Hmm.