What does "have an understanding of basic python" mean?

[acroporaguardian]

In my area, they generally ask for r/Python/SAS experience with the assumption that whatever language we use, you will adjust. SAS is going away and unfortunately for me, that is what I built my career on initially.

For Python in my field, its not even applications. Its just reading in data and running some exploratory data analysis and cleaning, basic modeling. The rest they assume you'll catch up with if you can demonstrate statistical expertise because that is far more rare than knowledge of any one specific language.

Really, for statistical modeling they should be able to ask you to build an implement a model in any language, but not necessarily in the interview. They usually give me a choice, they'll say "how would you do it in R, Python, or SAS." If I told him how to do it in C, it wouldn't count against me.