My brother is the archetype of a hacker. We wasted many hours learning basic on the c64 back in the day. He used to hook up old monochrome apple monitors to stereo output and achieve some really cool visualizations. (Ben Harper's Opression is probably the best). He wrote tetris for the Tandy TRS-80 in an afternoon. He's created many potato guns and pressurized water rockets. I've been trying to get him to learn python for years but he has resisted. In the past couple of weeks he gave in.
The motivation? Cobbling a bunch of existing parts together to make a Halloween game for the trick or treaters to play. Here's the parts used:
- MacBookPro with iSight
- pysight
- pygame
- Marshie
- Laser pointer mounted in pvc gun
- Projector
- Darkness
Next step, convince him to give a presentation at Pycon about it.
My brother's more detailed writeup is here.