• What’s the point of Useless Python?
• How did this madness start?
• How come the site changes appearance so often?

These questions and more may or may not be answered properly on this page. In a nutshell, here’s a list of things that happen here:

• Vigorous promotion of Python’s use in programming contests. Let’s show ’em our unfair advantage!
• Your tutorial, source code, opinions, and whatever else (Python-related) are welcome here. We’ll link to yours or mirror it.
• Joe Wannabe’s source code appears right next to that of Legendary Code Gurus.
• We’ll pass on word of any Python classes, conferences, workshops, new book announcements, and any Python-related press releases.
• If you need us to do something that’s not listed here, just ask. We’re open to persuasion.
• Other stuff.

On December 31st, 2000 on the Python Tutor email list we were discussing several perplexing connections between Danny Yoo and Tim Peters, when each of us saw the image of a large black obelisk in the viewing area of our email clients. We were briefly accelerated to superhuman levels of intelligence in order to fully receive the message being subliminally implanted in our minds to lie dormant until the appropriate signal.

But enough of the boring part. I’ll skip to the relevant bit. As we returned to our normal lives and previous intelligence levels, one guy was a little lagged behind because he was playing Quake III Arena during the entire mystical encounter. So he had superhuman intelligence for a few moments longer and babbled thusly:

“should we be making our individual python project’s code available to each other? There must be quite a few scripts in various stages of completion spread throughout the tutor subscribers. As a newbie (to programming as well as python), I would normally be embarrassed about releasing my hideously amateurish code, though I would have no problems sharing it with other list members. Ugly as my code may be, some of it has actually proven to be useful, so surely others here have written useful stuff as well. Making projects available to each other would give those without a project something to get into, and who knows, some stuff might get developed to the point of public release. What do you think? Sorry to sound like an open source evangelist……….. “

The site changes in appearance so much. This is often as frequent as a couple of times a week. The better it looks, the thicker the smoke where he crashed and burned this time. Oh, wait?. That’s not true at all. Ah, well, it’s already written, so we’ll just run with it.

If you’ve made it through all this madness (hope you had your towel!), and you think you’d like to help out, feel free. Send in anything you think might or might not come in handy for future and current Pythoneers. If you have nothing to offer, but time to kill, you can always look through the Tutor Archives, find good examples of things being explained well, and point it out. (Or better yet, do the editorial work and send that in!)