Comment by benhoyt

Deliberately-straightforward -- agreed. But "highly proficient" after writing one or two scripts? That's quite a stretch.

For instance, one of the questions I give in phone screens is for the candidate to write a program to count the number of occurrences of unique words in a text file. The "after writing one or two Python scripts" approach is something like this:

    counts = {}
    f = open('test.txt')
    lines = f.read().split('\n')
    for line in lines:
        for word in line.split(' '):
            if word:
                word = word.lower()
                if word in counts.keys():
                    counts[word] += 1
                else:
                    counts[word] = 1
    f.close()
    count_items = [(count, word) for word, count in counts.items()]
    count_items.sort()
    for count, word in reversed(count_items):
        print word, count

Whereas the "highly proficient" (and much simpler and more Pythonic) approach might look something like this:

    import collections
    counts = collections.Counter()
    with open('test.txt') as f:
        for line in f:
            for word in line.lower().split():
                counts[word] += 1
    for word, count in counts.most_common():
        print word, count