im probably just not being charitable enough to what you mean, but thats an absurd bar that almost nobody conforms to even if its fully handwritten. nothing would get done if they did. But again, my emphasis is on that im probably just not being charitable to what you mean.
x = 0
for i in range(1, 10):
x += i
print(x)
They just mean they can more or less follow along with what the code is doing. You don't need to be very charitable in order to understand what he genuinely meant, and understanding code that one writes is how many (but not all) professional software developers who didn't just copy and paste stuff from Stackoverflow used to carry out their work.
How deep do i need to understand range() or print() to utilize either, on the slightly less extreme end of the spectrum.
But ya, im pretty sure its a point that maybe i coulda kept to myself and been charitable instead.
print(X) is a great example. That's going to print X. Every time.
Agent.print(x) is pretty likely to print X every time. But hey, who knows, maybe it's having an off day.
Jeff Atwood, along with numerous others (who Atwood cites on his blog [1]) were not exaggerating when the observed that the majority of candidates who had existing professional experience, and even MSc. degrees, were unable to code very simple solutions to trivial problems.
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/why-cant-programmers-program/
That's how I read it, and I would agree with that.
If it's low-stakes, then the required depth to accept the code is also low.
at what level of abstraction can you claim to actually "understand" the code?
You're claiming to understand down to the CMOS, but you are failing to even engage with what level understanding should be accepted. is "down to the CMOS" the bar? because then you're gonna be on an uphill battle as potentially the only human who traces a simple hello world python script down to it, because thats not how people develop software with high level languages.
is understanding the print()'s underlying code the bar? seems fairly gatekeepy, its kinda intuitive what a print does, everyone trusts its gonna do what its designed to do in the same way we trust the water that comes out of our faucets.
Obviously I don't mean "understanding it so you can draw the exact memory layout on the white board from memory."