Sea Turtles - Celina B./Angelica R.

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[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.

The main thing I'd recommend thinking about, especially when working primarily with lists, is whether we can do a little pre-calculation here and there to build helper structures (often a frequency map of some kind stored in a dict) to improve the efficiency of our code. This is also true for data representation. Sometimes the most optimal way to store some data isn't the most optimal way to perform our needed lookups. And intermediate data transformation can give us the best of both worlds!

Overall, great work!

[anselrognlie]

Keep an eye out for unexpected imports. I don't see this being used, so it's likely VSCode "helpfully" pulled it in at some point.

[anselrognlie]

I also prefer pulling a big data structure like this out of any particular function into a module global. Putting this in the function directly would just make the function harder to read. We just need to be especially careful that we're not doing anything that would cause this to be modified, which would affect future uses of this data.

[anselrognlie]

While this representation of the scores is minimally repetitive, notice that when we look up scores in this structure later we're not able to use the optimal strategy of looking up directly by a piece of data we have (a letter) to get the value we don't (the score). Check my comments in score_word for some additional thoughts on this.

[anselrognlie]

👍 Nice helper to convert from the letter frequency data to a list where the letters present represent the actual "tiles".

[anselrognlie]

👍 Nice use of the the repeater operator!

This would also work as

        letter_pool_list += letter*count

The += operator more or less maps to list extend(), which takes an iterable, not necessarily another list. So the string repeater ("A"*3 → "AAA") itself produces an iterable (a string) where each character would be iterated over and then added to the pool list.

[anselrognlie]

When your implementation has distinct areas of code, it can be helpful to provide a comment on each section describing roughly what it does. This first part looks like it's locating the max score of any word (which word is incidental, but it will be whatever the first word in the list with this score was).

[anselrognlie]

Here, we're double calculating the score for each word (we already did it once when looking for the max score). The scoring function isn't free, so we might build a helper structure once at the start of this function that we can use to store the score for each word once, then just look it up any other times we need it. What structure would let as store that information?

[anselrognlie]

Breaking here would stop looking for any other shorter words. Maybe continue is what we want? It would skip over the current word, but would keep looking at later words in the list which could still be more favorable.

But if the only thing in the condition body is a continue do we even need this condition check?

It's a little difficult to get an intuitive sense of what this is doing, but a good takeaway from this is that if the comment explaining why this is like this is 4 times longer than the original line, maybe another pass is in order. 😄

[anselrognlie]

I think it would be safe to immediately break after this. As soon as we find a word whose length is 10, nothing else can beat it.

[anselrognlie]

We may want to do this check earlier in the if/elif chain. These are checked in order, and once we find a 10 letter word, we don't need to do any more checks.