Thats one issue I have with these proposed programming tasks.
You are not going to write a really great text editor as a learning exercise. It has been done by better programmers who had better overview of the problems and over thousands man hours.
This automatically means the task is as useless as a gameboy emulator or basic compiler. The underlying "Things to learn" points are good, but tasks themselves are not.
Writing experimental text editors for fun in various programming languages has been one of the most rewarding learning exercises of my life.
It's not really clear what your point is. You say the task is "useless"—what does that mean? Personally I can say that you are categorically wrong, because the skills I gained building things that are not completely new ideas fueled my passion for programming and opened up doors for me that otherwise would have remained closed. Even if I didn't still use a lot of these projects myself (because I built them to fit me), the value I derived from them would still be significant in the "grand" scheme of my life.
If a programmer is excited about the idea of writing her own text editor, what would you suggest she build instead that will sustain that same excitement and offer exploration into the same diverse subject matter but also satisfy your nebulous criterion of not being "useless"?
You are not going to write a really great text editor as a learning exercise. It has been done by better programmers who had better overview of the problems and over thousands man hours.
This automatically means the task is as useless as a gameboy emulator or basic compiler. The underlying "Things to learn" points are good, but tasks themselves are not.