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

[Schneider]

I would say it's a little bit more:
You have to know the keywords and (basic) concepts, e.g. you really have 
to understand what it means, that everything is a class.
If you get foreign, you have to be able to understand it. And the other 
way round, given a problem, you should be able to write a working solution.


bg
Johannes

On 09/20/2013 06:23 PM, Mark Janssen wrote:

I started Python 4 months ago. Largely self-study with use of Python 
documentation, stackoverflow and google. I was thinking what is the minimum 
that I must know before I can say that I know Python?

Interesting.  I would say that you must know the keywords, how to make
a Class, how to write a loop.  That covers about 85% of it.



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

[CM]

On Friday, September 20, 2013 5:58:00 AM UTC-4, Aseem Bansal wrote:
> I started Python 4 months ago. Largely self-study with use of Python 
> documentation, stackoverflow and google. I was thinking what is the minimum 
> that I must know before I can say that I know Python?

Seems to me a fuzzy boundary between "Not knowing" and "knowing".  I prefer 
thinking in terms of a spectrum, from 0-10 or pick your scale.

0 - Person who has never heard of Python or has but that's the extent of it.
1 - Beginning installer / Hello Worlder! / clumsy dabbler / what is self?
2 - Underway in earnest, not yet making anything all that much
3 - Making stuff, but clunky
4 - Making stuff pretty well, but looking up 2/3rds of it on SE or equivalent.
5 - Making stuff pretty well, but looking up 1/3rds of it on SE or equivalent.
6 - Making stuff pretty well, occasionally consulting the Python.org docs
7 - Tim Chase's list level
8 - The guy who hired the guy at 7 (assuming he is even further on)
9 - Gurus of this list
10 - Uber-gurus 
10^6 - Guido

I feel like I'm about 5 maybe, with some embarrassing chinks in the armor?  
Draw the "know line" boundary wherever you want, but I'd think you'd probably 
want to be above 4.  I know I'd feel more comfortable saying I know Python if I 
were at 7 (and thanks, Tim Chase; I saved that list a while back in my files to 
consult someday, maybe).  That said, I've written 20k+ loc of (mostly?) working 
code in Python and have done some contracting work at my humble 5, so there's 
that.



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

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 22 September 2013 23:41:10 Dennis Lee Bieber did opine:

> On Sun, 22 Sep 2013 14:55:24 -0400, Gene Heskett 
> 
> declaimed the following:
> >Then it seems to me that work in the direction should be an active
> >feature request.  Unforch, as I've said before, I'm rowing this barge
> >with a toothpick for an oar. :)
> >
> >I would be interesting to see if the "bait" is taken. :)
> 
>   Unfortunately, I see that as a requiring a change at the OS level.

Without knowing exactly how this was done on the Miggies, and the level of 
security we have here compared to zero on the amiga because of its flat, no 
mmu memory mapping, precludes my having a thought to argue about it in my 
wildest dreams.

Re ARexx, its biggest Achilles heel was the Rexx.lib, which became so 
obvious that Joanne Dow and someone else whose name I've spaced in the 
ensuing 15 years, actually dissed it, found several buglets and one real 
whoodoozy and fixed them, which enhanced the amiga's long term stability 
such that even the web server only had to be rebooted at 2 to 3 week 
intervals.  Yes, that Joanne Dow, you might remember the name from her bix 
days, is a friend of mine.  Quite a Lady IMO.  About as creative as anyone 
I've ever met in coming up with lady-like versions of screw you etc. ;-)  
Last I knew a year back up the log, she was still working, I don't have too 
many years on her, and my use by date has passed a long time ago Dennis, 
I'll be 79 on the next 4th.

>   Even on the OS that REXX was developed upon, my books give a strong
> hint that the only application that was readily "address app" compatible
> was a text editor. ARexx piggy-backed on the underlying linked list
> messages on "findable" message ports.
> 
>   Until the OS supports a multiple writer IPC with return addressing 
in
> an easy API, it's unlikely to be created. UDP/IP might be a way -- but
> UDP has that nasty unreliability factor. Amiga message ports had
> guaranteed delivery (as long as the receiving process read the queued
> messages; and VMS mailboxes were similar).
> 
>   Multiple writer -- as any process could send messages to the single
> receiving port; it wasn't a socket server style where connection
> requests on a single port would be assigned a distinct port subsequent
> usage.
> 
>   Then again, the Amiga auto-config for boards pre-dates the PCI-
express
> configuration system, which is very similar.

And that, despite being mostly written in Lisp, worked very well.  The fact 
that for every board initialized at boot time required a soft reboot that 
the user wasn't made obviously aware of, could get interesting though.

Cheers, Gene
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Re: What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 22 September 2013 15:46:52 Gene Heskett did opine:

> On Sunday 22 September 2013 14:49:21 Dennis Lee Bieber did opine:
> > On Sat, 21 Sep 2013 02:22:59 -0400, Gene Heskett 
> > 
> > declaimed the following:
> > >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.
> > >
> > No surprise given the lack of real /interactive/ IPC in Windows and
> > 
> > Linux. A version of REXX running on (Open)VMS might have a chance --
> > as VMS Mailboxes were a (protected memory equivalent) of Amiga
> > message ports... So a means of "address other_application" could be
> > mapped to opening "other_application_port".
> > 
> > I vaguely recall once using the "advanced" calls from the back of
> 
> the
> 
> > manual, and having multiple ARexx scripts talking to each other via
> > "address other_script"
> 
> We did that dozens of times a day on every machine we owned, which at
> the time was about just in the commercial production rooms.

s/about just/about 6 just/g

> > >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.
> > >
> > Having been spoiled by ARexx myself... No... Python will never be
> > 
> > /that/... Even subprocess.popen() doesn't allow for the easy control
> > of other programs. One is stuck with M$ COM (the win32 extension
> > library or, more portable maybe [if the libraries are ported] ctypes
> > to do what "address ..." did in ARexx.
> 
> Then it seems to me that work in the direction should be an active
> feature request.  Unforch, as I've said before, I'm rowing this barge
> with a toothpick for an oar. :)
> 
> I would be interesting to see if the "bait" is taken. :)
> 
> Thanks Dennis.
> 
> Cheers, Gene


Cheers, Gene
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Re: What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 22 September 2013 14:49:21 Dennis Lee Bieber did opine:

> On Sat, 21 Sep 2013 02:22:59 -0400, Gene Heskett 
> 
> declaimed the following:
> >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.
> 
>   No surprise given the lack of real /interactive/ IPC in Windows and
> Linux. A version of REXX running on (Open)VMS might have a chance -- as
> VMS Mailboxes were a (protected memory equivalent) of Amiga message
> ports... So a means of "address other_application" could be mapped to
> opening "other_application_port".
> 
>   I vaguely recall once using the "advanced" calls from the back of 
the
> manual, and having multiple ARexx scripts talking to each other via
> "address other_script"

We did that dozens of times a day on every machine we owned, which at the 
time was about just in the commercial production rooms.

> >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.
> 
>   Having been spoiled by ARexx myself... No... Python will never be
> /that/... Even subprocess.popen() doesn't allow for the easy control of
> other programs. One is stuck with M$ COM (the win32 extension library
> or, more portable maybe [if the libraries are ported] ctypes to do what
> "address ..." did in ARexx.

Then it seems to me that work in the direction should be an active feature 
request.  Unforch, as I've said before, I'm rowing this barge with a 
toothpick for an oar. :)

I would be interesting to see if the "bait" is taken. :)

Thanks Dennis.

Cheers, Gene
-- 
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 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
My web page:  should be up!

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BASIC after reaching puberty.
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Re: 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  
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  
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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 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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My web page:  should be up!

As pointed out in a followup, Real Perl Programmers prefer things to be
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Re: What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 12:31 PM, Roy Smith  wrote:
> In article ,
>  Chris Angelico  wrote:
>
>> On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 2:28 AM, Aseem Bansal  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
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Re: What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"

[Roy Smith]

In article ,
 Chris Angelico  wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 2:28 AM, Aseem Bansal  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 :-)
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Re: What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 3:40 AM, Aseem Bansal  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  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
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Re: What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"

[Terry Reedy]

On 9/20/2013 5:58 AM, Aseem Bansal wrote:

I started Python 4 months ago. Largely self-study with use of Python
documentation, stackoverflow and google. I was thinking what is the
minimum that I must know before I can say that I know Python?

I come from a C background which is comparatively smaller. But as
Python is comparatively much larger what minimum should I know?


The C stdlib may be smaller than the Python stdlib, but I do not think 
the language itself is much smaller. Python3 is a bit smaller than 
Python2 due to removals.


Python the language is defined in the Language Reference. So 'knowing 
Python' means knowing most of that. What I might leave out: the details 
of all the special method names; which bitwise operators do what; yield 
from (3.3+). From the library manual, I would include an overview of 
chapters 2 to 5. For instance, not memorize all the exceptions, but 
understand the hierarchy.


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

[Aseem Bansal]

I understand that being able to solve problems and knowing when to use 
something is the final measure of knowing something properly. 

But I wanted to find something quantitative that I can use to measure myself. 
Like the interview questions that Tim Chase posted.

Measuring myself based on the problems that I can think of is like a small 
child saying "I know that 1 + 1 = 2. So I know maths". That may be the toughest 
problem that he can think of. That isn't a correct evaluation of his math 
abilities. Similarly measuring myself on the basis of the problems that I can 
think of and solve doesn't actually measure anything.

I don't want to be living in a fool's paradise based on solving the problems I 
can solve. It is not being able to solve a problem that will make me realize my 
limits.

That's why I asked this question... I am kind of asking for advice.
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Re: What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"

[Aseem Bansal]

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  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. I needed to get stats from the front page of a website. I wrote a 
script for that. I plotted the stats using matplotlib. I collected data 
manually and missed running the script one day so I took care of that problem 
using Python. Wrote a script that checked for internet connectivity and then 
ran the scripts that downloaded the stuff I needed and then placed this script 
in the Windows startup folder. 

That was a nice feeling. Because I can just customize that startup script if I 
ever wanted to change my computer's startup behaviour.

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.
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Re: What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"

[Jugurtha Hadjar]

I think it is a philosophical question. It's like saying "I know maths", 
which is a ridiculous phrase I was surprised to hear, let alone 
surprised to hear often.


Can someone know everything there is to know about something ? I doubt 
it. The point, at least for me, isn't to know everything .. But the 
ability to find out.


I consider myself ignorant in almost everything, that's because I ask 
myself a lot of questions about a lot of things I ignore. The point is 
following up and looking things up so that you know them.


I knew many things I wasn't even aware existed. What this (constant 
questions) does is that it gives a lot of information that is networked 
(and you make a lot of connections between seemingly unrelated topics).


I'll give an example: I had a class in my second year in college about 
nuclear and atomic physics. There was a chapter about the Doppler 
effect. I was able to grasp it easily, because when I was a kid, it 
happened I took magazines in the bathroom to read, and I've read about it.


Having a déjà-vu impression in a lot of things and to be able to make 
analogies of concepts and principles has helped me tremendously. When I 
got into college and started programming PIC microcontrollers, having 
tinkered with Intel assembly language in high-school (disassembling 
executables and tinkering with them) was definitely a plus (Registers, 
operands, carry operations, hexadecimal, addresses).


When in the first year we started Pascal, I already did things in Delphi 
when I was in high-school. But then again, I also did tinker with C in 
middle-school (really basic stuff) and BASIC as a child.




Do I know Python ? No. I don't think I ever will. But I am confident I 
will be able to do what I cannot do right now, and the complexity of the 
things I will be able to do will increase, as will my ability to 
simplify complex things.



It's a converging exponential, as a capacitor charging. The goal is to 
minimized the time constant so you get at about 63.2% fast. The 
incremental 1%s will take years and I don't think you'll ever hit 100%, 
not even after decades. Sorry :)





--
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Re: What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"

[Mark Janssen]

> I started Python 4 months ago. Largely self-study with use of Python 
> documentation, stackoverflow and google. I was thinking what is the minimum 
> that I must know before I can say that I know Python?

Interesting.  I would say that you must know the keywords, how to make
a Class, how to write a loop.  That covers about 85% of it.
-- 
MarkJ
Tacoma, Washington
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Re: What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"

[Aseem Bansal]

By C being smaller than Python I did not mean the scope of C is lesser than 
Python. I simply meant that the standard libraries are less in number compared 
to Python.

By knowing Python I didn't imply an expert-level understanding. Minimum that so 
someone cannot say "Hey, you said you knew Python but you don't know 
anything.". Something on these lines. You can say for cracking interviews 
and/or as a junior programmar and/or as a fresher getting into industry.

I like to have test cases for my functions/scripts but that wasn't what I had 
in my mind.

Also I am learning Python because it is faster to make things with it. Not 
because it is going to get me any marks or anything.

@Tim Chase
That list helped. I was looking for something like that. Questions which I can 
try to answer and see where I stand.

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.
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Re: What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"

[Chris Angelico]

On Sat, Sep 21, 2013 at 2:28 AM, Aseem Bansal  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
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Re: What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"

[rusi]

On Friday, September 20, 2013 7:09:13 PM UTC+5:30, Robert Kern wrote:
> On 2013-09-20 12:43, rusi wrote:
> > Stroustrup says he is still learning C++ and I know kids who have no qualms 
> > saying they know programming language L (for various values of L) after 
> > hardly an hour or two of mostly advertising and pep-talk exposure.
> 
> > So without knowing what you mean my 'knowing' I am not going to try 
> > answering q-1
> 
> 
> I think that's his actual question: "What do *you* mean by 'I know Python'?" 
> At what point in your Python career did you feel comfortable claiming that?

Hmm... Now you are putting me in a spot :-)
Too many aspects to this to give a reasonably short answer :-)
I'll try and collect my thoughts in due course...

What I meant to say to the OP:
Knowing a language can mean widely different things:
1. to crack interviews
2. as a junior programmer
3. as a tech-lead
4. for bug-fixing/maintaining others' code

A big difference between 1 and 2 is the value of obfuscated/ting code
For 1 knowing trick questions/answers is a big win; for 2 more likely a loss.
Also for 1 a big breath-first knowledge is required; for 2 its ok to know a 
subset well and be able to use it with good taste.

For 3 right emotions are more important than details -- to look at a 
significant piece of code and be accurate in exclaiming "Wonderful/Blechhh"

4 is really an important and much neglected mindset. Ive talked about it here

http://blog.languager.org/2010/02/service-and-product-mindsets.html

Ok... So trying to say (a little!) in answer to your (Robert's) question though 
tangentially.

Ive spent 20 years in a university.  Most of what goes on there may be called 
gaming.
- The best students are not the one's who know or love to know most but who 
successfully game the system
- The best teachers are not those who teach best but who are one-up on the 
students' gaming habits and tendencies
- The best administrators are those who are cleverest at using academic 
(sounding) jargon to make lucrative institutions

Sounds cynical?  Well most of the students are not the 'best students' above 
and so its more important to gauge where (s)he is coming from, where going etc 
and to answer appropriately rather than giving to-the-point answers when the 
student may be too bewildered to ask exact/precise questions.

Basically instruct him just enough on how to game the system so that he clears 
the course but not so much he loses his soul!
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Re: What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"

[Chris Angelico]

On Fri, Sep 20, 2013 at 7:58 PM, Aseem Bansal  wrote:
> I started Python 4 months ago. Largely self-study with use of Python 
> documentation, stackoverflow and google. I was thinking what is the minimum 
> that I must know before I can say that I know Python?
>
> I come from a C background which is comparatively smaller. But as Python is 
> comparatively much larger what minimum should I know?
>
> Just a general question not for a specific purpose.

Interesting.

Everything's relative. I would say that I "know Python" at the point
where I am comfortable using it to solve problems, as opposed to using
it to learn Python. That is to say, when you choose Python (above
bash, or above some other language, or whatever) because it will take
you less time to achieve a goal in Python than in any other language,
when it's the goal that's important.

I'd also add, though it's somewhat tangential to the first, that
"knowing Python" also requires knowing when/where Python is a good
choice of language. I like to be able to make one-sentence summaries
of the form "X is a good choice when you want to...":

* Python: put something together NOW, with no boilerplate
* Pike: run a server that reloads code without dropping connections
* C: implement a high level language (or a module for one)
* PHP: gouge your eyes out with a rusty fork, but aren't allowed to on work time
* Haskell: code functionally rather than imperatively (I'm not
familiar with a broad range of functional languages; someone who is
would be distinguishing them from each other)
* bash: execute a series of commands, with minimal processing in between
* Lua: embed a tiny and secure scripting language in an application
* JavaScript/ECMAScript: ditto, but less tiny
* Brainf*: gouge your eyes out with a rusty fork, but aren't allowed to use PHP

Etcetera. Familiarity with a language requires knowing both how to use
it and when to use it.

ChrisA
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Re: What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"

[Robert Kern]

On 2013-09-20 12:43, rusi wrote:

On Friday, September 20, 2013 3:28:00 PM UTC+5:30, Aseem Bansal wrote:

I started Python 4 months ago. Largely self-study with use of Python 
documentation, stackoverflow and google. I was thinking what is the minimum 
that I must know before I can say that I know Python?

I come from a C background which is comparatively smaller. But as Python is 
comparatively much larger what minimum should I know?

Just a general question not for a specific purpose.


Stroustrup says he is still learning C++ and I know kids who have no qualms 
saying they know programming language L (for various values of L) after hardly 
an hour or two of mostly advertising and pep-talk exposure.
So without knowing what you mean my 'knowing' I am not going to try answering 
q-1


I think that's his actual question: "What do *you* mean by 'I know Python'?" At 
what point in your Python career did you feel comfortable claiming that?


--
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
 that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
 an underlying truth."
  -- Umberto Eco

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

[Tim Chase]

On 2013-09-20 02:58, Aseem Bansal wrote:
> I started Python 4 months ago. Largely self-study with use of
> Python documentation, stackoverflow and google. I was thinking what
> is the minimum that I must know before I can say that I know Python?

It's a fuzzy line.  A good while back, there was a thread regarding
Python interview questions:

http://www.mail-archive.com/python-list@python.org/msg168971.html

to which I replied with a pretty large list.  The idea was not to
ensure that people knew everything on it, but as a way to take stock
of somebody means by "I know Python", which can mean anything from "I
wrote _Hello World_ in Python once" to "I'm Guido/Raymond/Effbot".

Along with the "Basics" section of that email, I'd expect a reasonable
understanding of commonly-used libraries offered out of the box (at
least a breadth of what is there, even if you haven't used them
much).

Most of the "history" items in that list are somewhat moot unless you
have to support older Python (I still have some 2.4 installs that
don't let me use the "with" statement or sqlite by default).

-tkc




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

[rusi]

On Friday, September 20, 2013 3:28:00 PM UTC+5:30, Aseem Bansal wrote:
> I started Python 4 months ago. Largely self-study with use of Python 
> documentation, stackoverflow and google. I was thinking what is the minimum 
> that I must know before I can say that I know Python?
> 
> 
> 
> I come from a C background which is comparatively smaller. But as Python is 
> comparatively much larger what minimum should I know?
> 
> 
> 
> Just a general question not for a specific purpose.

Stroustrup says he is still learning C++ and I know kids who have no qualms 
saying they know programming language L (for various values of L) after hardly 
an hour or two of mostly advertising and pep-talk exposure.
So without knowing what you mean my 'knowing' I am not going to try answering 
q-1

I am just curious about q-2 -- C is small compared to python -- whats your 
measure for that?

BTW 20 years ago I wrote about why C is very hard to learn and teach
In these intervening years some things have changed, some have not

See
http://blog.languager.org/2013/02/c-in-education-and-software-engineering.html#relevate
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