Right. But the question is why redo the exact same joke? Why not come up with another twist (like the URL lengthener) or do no twist but be useful?

I’m not criticising the author or anyone who came before. I’m trying to understand the impetus between redoing a joke that isn’t yours. You don’t learn anything new by redoing the exact same gag that you wouldn’t learn by being even slightly original or making the project truly useful.

Ideas are a dime a dozen. You could make e.g. a Fonzie URL shortener (different lengths of “ayyyyy”), or an interstellar one (each is the name of a space object), or a binary one (all ones and zeroes)… Each of those would take about the same effort and teach you the same, but they’re also different enough they would make some people remember them, maybe even look at the author and their other projects, instead of just “oh, another one of these, close”.

▲

zulban 25 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

If you don't need to design a new product, you can focus on execution.

You may want to learn about design and novelty. Some people just want to learn about execution.

▲

stronglikedan 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

If you're learning, it's better to recreate something exactly as it is, so that you have something against which to verify your output. Plus, not everyone is an idea person, and I'd wager that most devs are implementation people, not idea people.

	▲	latexr 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I’d argue that if you’re learning and are so inexperienced you need to recreate something exactly, you should instead recreate something real and useful—of which there are more examples—than one joke. Plus, I don’t think I’ve seen another of these which is exactly like this (just extremely close in concept), so the argument doesn’t hold.

▲

postalcoder 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A joke isn’t the best example because there are jokes that never changes but the delivery is a sign of mastery. The Aristocrats is like Bach’s cello suite for comedians.

	▲	latexr 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The Aristocrats is a special case where the setup is the joke instead of the punchline. The point is the inventiveness of the journey. If it was told with the same setup every time, it wouldn’t be funny.