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Date: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 18:07:34 +0100
From: Jugurtha Hadjar <jugurtha.hadjar@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: What minimum should a person know before saying "I know Python"
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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 :)




-- 
~Jugurtha Hadjar,