lab_dice/assessment.md

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# Dice Lab Assessment
Everything works as expected. Nice work!
## Checkpoint 1
I love your decision to comment your code, and to write the generalized
function `findn`. Within that function, your loop iterating over die
faces works fine, but checking whether `nmuch[die]` is initialized
will become tiresome after a while. There's a nice idiom for this,
using defaultdict. A defaultdict is like a normal dict, but when you
first access a key, its value is initialized for you if it's not
already present.
```
from collections import defaultdict
def findn(self, nofakind):
nmuch = defaultdict(int)
for die in dice.faces():
nmuch[die] += 1
if nmuch[die] == nofakind:
return True
return False
```
Just a little cleaner :)
## Checkpoint 2
Within your `yachtzee_goals`, I'm guessing that you probably had a feeling
that copying the same method over into multiple classes wasn't the best way
to do it--this would be a perfect place to use a subclass or a mixin,
python's approach to inheritance and multiple inheritance respectively.
## Comments
> I think I was thinking of objects pretty
> literally as "things" one can do stuff to or with, e.g. dice that can be
> rolled. Goals don't immediately jump out as me in the same way...
I quite agree! This was actually one of my goals in this unit--to move from more
concrete instantiations of classes (e.g. modeling dice) to less concrete (e.g.
modeling Goals, or, in the game project, things like Strategies.
> I imagine if I were to try doing this in unit 1 or 2, instead of
> treating the game as an object interacting with other objects (the dice
> and goals), it'd probably be some sort of loop with functions being
> called to mimic the methods and a declaration of a lot of global
> variables to keep track of things like score...
Yes, exactly! The beauty of encapsulating this kind of behavior within
classes really starts to shine when your projects get bigger; if you have n
components in a project, there are n^2 possible interactions if everything
potentially interacts with everything. Debugging becomes impossible.
You have some really lovely reflections in these git comments :)