Python for Fun

Python for Fun turns 20 this year. From the first project "Lisp in Python" to the current latest "Binary Trees and Functional Programming", the site is and remains a collection of fairly small projects created mostly for fun. They are aimed at the intermediate programmer; people who know Python and are fairly comfortable with OOP and perhaps a bit of basic recursion. Most programs are quite short, generally a few pages of code and all of the projects are accompanied with a write-up.

Since 1995 I have found Python to be an excellent programming language, heads above others I have used professionally and for fun. I've enjoyed watching Python take a very clear lead in the last several years among programming languages used in the Computer Science as well as in the sciences departments at my Alma Mater (University of Oregon).

I hope you enjoy these projects as much as I have. If you have comments or suggestions for improvements You can email me at mailme.html

Many thanks to Paul Carduner and Jeff Elkner for their work on this page, especially for Paul's graphic of “Psyltherin” (apologies to Harry Potter) and to the teams behind reStructured text and Sphinx.

The Collection

All projects here run on Python 2.7 and above (3.x)

• Programming Techniques
• Dynamic Programming in Python
• Decorators and Closures in Python

• Python for fun support library

• Graph Algorithms
• Minimum Spanning Tree
• Binary Trees and Functional Programming
• Dijkstra's Shortest Paths

• K-means (Clustering Nodes)

• Text Processing
• Huffman Text Compression
• Spell Checking: Small, Simple and Fast
• Soundex: approximate spelling

• Natural Language Processing

• Chance and Probability
• Wealth Inequaltiy. How it Grows
• Chaos in Action. Feigenbaum bifurctions

• Monty Hall problem. Where intuition fails.

• Games and Animation
• Animal Trees
• Lode Runner: A Simple Video Game (text version)
• Functional Python (the 8 queens puzzle)
• Sudoku in Python
• Tiles Puzzle
• Towers of Hanoi - MVC and Recursion
• Waves and Harmonics. Fourier Analysis

• Minimax and Alpha/Beta. Kalah for 2

• Languages Emulated in Python
• Forth in Python
• Karel the Robot in Python
• Lisp in Python
• How Compilers Do It
• Prolog in Python (Introduction)

• Prolog in Python (Part 1)

• Toy Computer Simulation
• Simulator for Toy Computer
• Assembler for Toy Computer

• Compiler for Toy Computer

• Computer Hardware Emulation
• Logic1 - Circuits Simple Gates to Addition

• Logic2 - Circuits with Graphic Animation