What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 3:40 AM, Aseem Bansal <asmbansal2 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Friday, September 20, 2013 10:04:32 PM UTC+5:30, Chris Angelico wrote:
>> On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 2:28 AM, Aseem Bansal <asmbansal2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> > I hope that cleared some confusion about what I wanted to ask. I wanted to gauge myself to find if I am progressing or not.
>>
>> Well, based on my definition, that's easy to answer. Have you solved
>> problems using Python? If you have a bunch of HTML pages and you need
>> to get some info out of all of them by COB today, do you think "I can
>> do that with Python", or do you think "I can do that with sed, awk,
>> grep, and five levels of pipe"? The tools you use for an urgent job
>> will be the ones you know.
>>
>> ChrisA
>
> Yeah I have...
> But that was pure luck that I had done the random example that you had chosen. It would be difficult to find my overall progress by the one thing.
>
> I am currently unemployed so the sense of urgency isn't there normally. That's why I asked this question. But I got your point.

It wasn't exactly a random example; it's an extremely common task
(maybe without the "must be done today" restriction), and one that
Python happens to do fairly well. :)

There was a time, back in the 1990s, when REXX was my primary
language. (We were exclusively an OS/2 shop at the time, so it was a
good choice.) If I needed to write a quick script, it would be in
REXX. If I needed to parse text, I'd use REXX. If I wanted a GUI app,
I'd write it in VX-REXX. Later on, when I needed to write Windows
code, I tended to use C++. It wasn't till the late 2000s that I
started using Python for those sorts of jobs - even though I'd met the
language back in the 90s - indicating that that's when I actually knew
the language.

ChrisA