I have my own idea for a Summer of Code Project; an implementation of mysqldump, but in Python. I see it as a good choice because the spec is already there for you - you just have to make it work. There's also a lot of concepts to learn in writing it (consistent snapshots, dealing with a potential combination of character sets).

My intention of proposing this isn't as a replacement to the existing mysqldump, but rather as a community maintained alternative. There are some features missing in mysqldump that I could add myself if it was in a language I am friendlier with. Two of these would be --slave-data, and parallel dumping[1], but that is not a complete list.

[1] Yes, I'm aware of maatkit. I want to use the mysqldump interface though.