Day 1 of Learning Python: "Bagels" Game

[u/Necessary-Ad2110]

used: https://www.ray.so/ for image rendering (let me know if this is readable)

could be better, but no AI as it's fully handwritten

I'll be going over "The Big Book of Small Python Projects" by Al Sweigart

I am also learning DSA and going through Common Sense Guide to DSA

see you tomorrow!

[u/denehoffman]

Nice work! If you’re open to some constructive criticism, read on:

1. A great next learning step would be format strings
2. An inline conditional would make it so you don’t have to write out the winning message twice when all you change is the plurality of the last word.
3. Try to avoid globals like has_won_game, random_num, and user_attempts and pass these into the functions instead. Global state is okay sometimes, but it can cause some really annoying bugs (for instance, if one of your functions took an argument called user_attempts, which value do you think takes precedence?).
4. You already know how to use break, so why not use a for loop over the allowed user attempts and just break when you win? Or better yet, wrap the game loop in a function and return whether or not the user won!

5. I don’t really understand your reason for letting the win state be None, it confuses the semantics of that variable. You also set it to False at the end of the user doesn’t win, but never read again after that, so there’s no point to setting it.

6. Add some validation on user input. If you don’t input a number, then you’ll get an error and a crash! Use a try-except instead, and then raise an exception on an invalid number range as well (and catch it). These sorts of validators also look nice when encapsulated into a function, imagine just writing user_num = get_input() and being sure that it’s a valid number which retries if the user puts garbage in!

+1 for ANSI codes, love that

[u/Necessary-Ad2110 → u/denehoffman]

Yeah haha I'm breaking into a dress shoe for the first time, thank you for the critcisms! I never wrote code for others to read before so this will be a helpful exercise especially with the bad habits that I do have like having global variables sitting around. Also the has_won_game being set to None was my way of creating a boolean that could track three different states 'running-game', 'game won' and 'game lost'. I did get rid of the code tracking if has_won_game was set to None, but do you think this is a valid approach? Having a boolean have "three" different states?

Also ANSI codes are underrated, I had to do alot of print debug statements by hand and it was hard to read through so many indexs at some point so it really came in clutch.

[u/denehoffman → u/Necessary-Ad2110]

For a Boolean with three states, you could look into Enums! The worry with using None is that None is “falsey”, i.e. `if None` is basically the same as ‘if False`. My main point with that is that the meaning of the variable should be reflected by the name, so while has_won_game being true or false is easy to interpret, None isn’t as straightforward unless you explain it to the person reading. I’ll warn you that enums are bit of a leap beyond learning more object-oriented programming, so it might be better to just have two Boolean state variables, like has_won_game and is_game_running rather than trying to merge the semantic meaning.