I've never understood why this question is asked on Hacker News. Can you really not imagine why someone would try to do this, even as just an intellectual exercise?
Perhaps he has sufficient imagination to come up with two or three possible reasons why someone might do this, and hence is asking so as to find out which is the actual reason.
By asking, he might learn something, especially if the reason turns out to be one he had not thought of.
You're probably just playing the devil's advocate, but it's plainly obvious that the guy was just being rude. If he was actually interested in an "I can see so many reasons you'd make this" kind of way he wouldn't have been so curt.
Perhaps in this particular case the questioner WAS trying to be rude, but that's not relevant to my reply to hvs. Note hvs said he could not understand why this question is asked on HN. He was talking about people in general who ask "why", not this particular questioner.
I'm astonished that anyone would be surprised that on HN, of all places, that people would be curious about why someone is doing something. One of the defining characters of hackers is curiosity.
I've actually been slowly getting accustomed to this. Before, I used to just drink my hateorade when it came to things like this, but ever since I've started to visit HN more frequently, my tolerance has expanded.
Depends if porting code from one procedural language to another is an "intellectual exercise" (it usually isn't). Compare with the x86 emulator written in JS that we saw a few months back.
That said, viewing a git repo in a web browser by querying the repo over HTTP directly is pretty damn cool.
Because you can. I've made far more useless stuff simply because I felt it would be interesting or a challenge to make. Which in turn are usually the projects I learn the most from.