I heard somewhere that a developer was annoyed with pigeons landing on his balcony. He wrote a script to recognise a pigeon and shoot it with a water pistol.

If you like gaming and would like to venture into beginner games, I would recommend the wonderful world of MUDs. There is a full-blown engine written in Python called evennia if you want to get started with helping out or designing your own games. If you are interested in gaming AI there is a neat project called Serpent AI made with creating smart AI in games.

If you are into designing application on the web I would look into Tornado, Django, and Flask

If you would like to create apps that can be distributed on a variety of environments such as iOS, Android, and various other cross-platforms look into kivy

If you are more scientifically orientated and looking to create applications that would aid in the scientific community, there are a plethora of projects all around. Some examples are:

• OpenCV - for an open source computer vision library.

• spaCy - a python library for natural language processing.

• Prophet - a high quality time-series forecasting library

I would recommend that you go on github and “explore” the different open source projects that are hosted in Python. And also... fuckit... if you just want everything related to science including modules you will probably never use, just download anaconda and be done with it.

If you want to get your hands dirty with Machine Learning there is tensorflow and/or PyTorch for the curious critters, and they have some simple tutorials to get you started.

If you want to mess with 3D animation there is blender that uses Python as its scripting language.

If you are interested in IoT and embedded systems I would look into raspberrypi coupled with wiringpi gives you full access to the GPIO. For machine learning at a small scale, I highly recommend the Jetson Nano by NVIDIA.

If you want to create powerful programs that are optimized and require C like speed look into cython I use this extensively in our RD lab.

If GUIs are your thing there are a number of frameworks available while tkinter and PyQt are the most versatile and popular. where pyqt is python bindings to the popular Qt C++ gui framework.

With addition from u/aussie_bob

Expanding the IoT capabilities there does exist a firmware development library in python called micropython that allows running firmware code on specific microcontrollers. Be aware for any Arduino folks, the ultimate downfall with a project like this is the amount of overhead needed in order to have a runtime python interpreter. Straight from the docs suggests that it uses 256Kb of Program space and up to 20k RAM.

It's tough to answer your questions mainly because Python is such a versatile language and it can be utilized in a broad spectrum of disciplines. It's also tough to answer your “point me to a useful and practical program” to create because each program out there is practical to someone in some way.

Also a few words of encouragement. If someone ever laughs at ideas that you have, sucker punch them in the fucking face. Today's technology was built and invented by people who were laughed and mocked at. Bombarded with ideas that it wasn't possible. Let's look at the most recent amazing feat for humankind. We reconstructed a picture of a black hole, there were many who concluded this was impossible and only reserved for the sci-fi community.

Take out your phone that is in your pocket, and gaze upon one of the most life-changing technologies to have ever been created. Imagine in 2001 you told people you could look at porn on your phone, they would have laughed in your face.

Imagine what folks would have said 10 years ago if we told them about the possibilities of constructing a quantum computer? Or self landing rockets, made possible by SpaceX.

No.

Fuck folks who dampen innovation and creativity.

There is never such a thing as a stupid idea.

Edit: Cool, thanks for the silver and gold