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

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 12:31 PM, Roy Smith <roy at panix.com> wrote:
> 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, absolutely! I never said that sed/awk/grep was a bad way to do
things; my point is that, when there are dozens of viable solutions to
a problem and you have to solve that problem *now*, you are going to
reach for the one you know best. I use sed all the time (it's one of
the easiest ways to edit a root-owned file from a non-root shell
script - 'sudo sed -i').

ChrisA