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

[Roy Smith]

In article <mailman.192.1379694881.18130.python-list at python.org>,
 Chris Angelico <rosuav at gmail.com> 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.

The fact that you reach for traditional command-line tools to parse HTML 
should not be taken as evidence that you don't know Python.  It should 
be taken as evidence that you have a lot of tools in your quiver and 
know when to use the right one.

I started with Python in the 1.4 days.  I will reach for Python these 
days in preference to Perl, Tcl, C, C++, Java, or PHP for most things.  
But, for a lot of basic text processing, I can throw together a sed, 
awk, grep, sort, uniq, wc, tac, tail, etc pipeline faster than I can 
write a Python program to do the same thing.

Oh, and by the way, the python.org home page has

$ curl -s python.org | tr ' ' '\n' | grep ^href= | wc -l
     124

124 links on it.

You're still reading the BeautifulSoup docs :-)