“Import This” was the slogan for the Tenth
International Python Conference, (“It Fits Your Brain” was the
motto of the ninth conference, which I wrote about in a previous
article). The event took place February 4-7, 2002, at the Hilton
Alexandria Mark Center in Alexandria, Virginia, a few miles from
the Pentagon City station on the Washington, DC metro. According to
the conference registrar, 244 people attended, 83% of last year’s
attendance. The decrease seems to be a result of companies’ tighter
travel budgets this year and the fact that the conference wasn’t
held in California.The keynote talks were unusual this year because both were
delivered by Python outsiders. What they did have was experience in
other relevant areas, allowing them to give us fresh ideas that we
in the Python community may not have been able to come up with
ourselves. The two speakers were Andrew König, who played a
key role in the standardization of C++, and Tim Berners-Lee, father
of the World Wide Web. Besides the keynotes, there were four tracks
of seminars: Refereed Papers, Zope, Python Tools, and Web Services
and Protocols.This article describes the keynotes and seminars during the two
main conference days, as well as Guido von Rossum’s talk and the
other discussions held during Developers’ Day.