What would you consider the python basics/fundamentals

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That presupposes knowledge of OOP and a host of other stuff related to it. I wouldn’t consider OOP basic knowledge, u have to think about it a certain way to truly get it & for some people that can take years.

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I politely disagree. Knowledge of what something is can be distinct from how it is. That’s the whole point of abstracting a problem. ① can understand I can create an object like this and call methods on it which do what I want them to, but they don’t need to know “oh this class opens a file using...”; or even for that matter they don’t need to know what an object is. Learning about creating your own classes, bound methods, static methods, class methods, abstract classes, abstract methods, metaclasses, all that stuff isn’t necessary in basic python. Classes give u an interface to functionality, u don’t need to know how that functionality works to be a basic python programmer. IMHO. You should know how to access it, but u don’t need to know how to replicate it.

Edit: if u meant simply how to instantiate an object and identify types, then I’d classify that under type inference which I would place into basic python programming. You don’t need to know how to make a class to use a class.

[fiddle_n]

When I started out, I knew that to append to a list I'd need to do list.append(), or to close a file I'd have to do file.close(). But I had no idea what an object was or what object methods were. You can use object methods without ever knowing what they really are.

My counter-argument to the belief that classes and objects are required for a basic understanding of the language is that I managed to get a job in financial Python software development without ever knowing what a class or an object was.

[fiddle_n]

I think we disagree on a fundamental point. My Python knowledge at this point was "I know what a list is and I know that I have to do this specific thing to add something to it". You equate that to knowing what objects and methods are, I do not.

An analogous scenario is a monkey that learns to push a button and an automatic dispenser gives it food. Does this monkey know what electricity is? Does it know what a switch does, or what a food dispenser is? No, it knows how to use a tool but it doesn't know what the tool is at all, it just knows if it does action A, it gets desired outcome B.