Spruce Class - Veronica Osei

[VeronicaO27]

No description provided.

[anselrognlie]

Nice job!

All waves are complete and all tests are passing! Your code is well organized, and you are generally using good, descriptive variable names. You used lists and dictionaries throughout, and were aware of when you needed to make copies to avoid side-effects. Really nice uses of docstrings as well! Be sure to check out PEP257 for some general docstring guidelines, and this article has some links to other recommendations.

All in all, this was a really concise approach throughout. I liked seeing the use of helper data structures to improve the efficiency of working with lists of tiles/words. Don't forget to dig into documentation from time to time to recall methods you may have forgotten (get from dict) or to learn about additional capabilities (counts for sample).

Overall, great work!

[anselrognlie]

I also like having this defined as a "constant" outside the function. Theoretically, we could write our draw_letters method to accept a pool as a parameter (defaulting to this one). But moving a large chunk of data out from a function also just helps declutter the function. 🙂

[anselrognlie]

If we're doing a ranged for where we don't use the loop variable, _ is a good name which communicates to other devs that we don't care about this variable.

    for letter, frequency in LETTER_POOL.items():
            for _ in range(frequency):
                letter_list.append(letter)

But here, we could even use list repetition to avoid the inner loop entirely!

    for letter, frequency in LETTER_POOL.items():
        letter_list += [letter] * frequency

[anselrognlie]

We can even get sample to take care of building the expanded list for us (as of 3.9). In fact, internally, it even avoids building that expanded list!

    return random.sample(LETTER_POOL.keys(), counts=LETTER_POOL.values(), k=10)

When we run across helpful functions, it can be worth looking into the documentation to see whether it has any other functionality that might be useful!

[anselrognlie]

👍

Great job building a frequency map from the tiles to efficiently check whether we can make the supplied word!

[anselrognlie]

We can use the get method of dict to simplify this a bit:

        count = letter_frequency.get(letter, 0)  # returns 0 if the key isn't in the dict
        letter_frequency[letter] = count + 1

We could also think about using collections Counter (though there's nothing wrong with building the map ourselves. It's great practice!)

[anselrognlie]

get can help us again here!

        if not letter_frequency.get(letter, 0):
            return False
       
        letter_frequency[letter] -= 1

[anselrognlie]

Nice lookup table for the tile scores. As with LETTER_POOL, we might move this to a "constant" outside the function so that it doesn't need to be re-created each time we call the scoring function.

[anselrognlie]

Consider creating constants to represent these literal values, for example:

MIN_BONUS_LENGTH = 7
MAX_BONUS_LENGTH = 11
LENGTH_BONUS = 8

Also, using in on range has to check each generated value in the range to see whether it matches the input (O(n) over the size of the range). It's not a big range here, but generally, to check whether a value is within a "range" of numbers, we can simply use comparisons, such as:

    # note this in-between syntax is very python-specific. most other languages DON'T work this way
    if MIN_BONUS_LENGTH <= len(word) < MAX_BONUS_LENGTH:
        score_of_points += LENGTH_BONUS

Also, do we really need to check for the upper bound?

    if MIN_BONUS_LENGTH <= len(word):
        score_of_points += LENGTH_BONUS

[anselrognlie]

Nice approach of tracking the current winning word and score!

[anselrognlie]

Nice set of tie-breaker checks. There are a number of ways to group these. In fact, it's even possible to combine these into a single check! Try playing around with it!