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

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 21 September 2013 01:34:50 Chris Angelico did opine:

> 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

That also brings back fond memories of the days of the amiga, Chris.

We had a huge superset of REXX called ARexx, which brought every system 
call that AmigaDOS had right into the script writers usage menu.  Jim Hines 
and I wrote the only cron the amiga ever had that didn't busy wait, so cpu 
usage was minimal.  Called it EzCron. Gave it away. Then since the x10 
stuff for home automation was /the/ system back in the day, we wrote 
EzHome, which had an MUI driven gui, and sold that for a time.  It, ARexx, 
was written by a William Hawes, and sold thru the commie dealer chains at 
the time.  I've no clue whatever became of that gentleman after that, but 
it came to light much that he never got a dime for writing ARexx from those 
2 crooks that bought commie and moved it to the Bahamas where he, nor 
anyone else, could sue to collect.  I did note that for many years, there 
was a subdir on kernel.org for him to work in, but to my knowledge it was 
empty when I downloaded and built my first x86 based linux kernel in early 
1998, and remained empty till whenever.

I was quite pleased to see that there was a Rexx/Regina for linux, and for 
about 10 minutes thought I could make use of the library of ARexx code Jim 
& I had carved up and had running on the amiga, but was very disappointed 
to see that Regina wasn't coupled to the os itself in any way, causing our 
scripts to barf and exit within the first 3 or 4 lines of code.

Our first web page at WDTV.com in the winter of 1999-2000 was served up on 
a dialup circuit, by an ARexx script we wrote, from an amiga 2000.

Heady days, those, while the dosboxes were still struggling with trumpet, 
and choking on the all the amiga, pdp and VAX dust. But time marches on, 
while the amiga didn't.

I've seen python doing some heady stuff in the last 5 years, but the 
learning curve is pretty steep for my now aging wet ram, which will be 79 
years old in a few days, so the scripting language here at the Heskett 
Ranchette is bash, and there is quite a boatload of that running as 
background daemons right now.  So I lurk, reading what goes by, hoping I'll 
learn enough python from osmosis to get comfortable with it.  From all 
indications, it is todays "ARexx" of scripting languages.

I'll get me coat now. :)


Cheers, Gene
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