If I may comment *as* a new contributor: Terry responded almost immediately to my first issue raised, and that was a huge boost. If no-one had replied at all, I suspect I would never have spent any more time contributing to any part of Python. (And I contributed 8 more hours today.)

Incidentally, given that this is my first post: Hi everyone, my name's Mark Smith. I'm a Python contractor based in Edinburgh, and my nick on IRC is juD2k (for strange, yet dull historical reasons) :-)

--Mark