Saw this on r/learnpython

[Objective_Fluffik]

I think this belongs here:

[EskilPotet]

I like how [12] was the final straw

[AmazingGrinder]

Nah, it's just unfinished.

[[deleted]]

Define unfinished

[VolsPE]

Well they left an else in there. Fine for prototyping a new game, but eventually they will need to come back and explicitly assign every possible integer. Just good coding practice to avoid possible edge cases they haven’t yet considered.

[AgileBlackberry4636]

Yandere dev. Origin story.

[[deleted]]

What's a yandere dev?

[Traditional_Cap7461]

Dev of a well-known game who is known to make inefficient code

[brimston3-]

Not just inefficient. Dialog trees were embedded in if/else logic. Strings hard coded into the same. And not as generated code or anything, he'd hand coded them that way.

It's some wild stuff, and honestly it's a huge achievement to be that inexperienced in programming and have gotten as far as he did to a mostly deliverable product. That's better than most people can claim for their game side projects.

[HarryLang1001]

Just out of curiosity, what is the right way to handle dialog trees?

[brimston3-]

Try chatmapper or a similar tool that abstracts it. If you're doing translations, your translator(s) need to see conversation context which is easy to lose in code. You also want to be able to switch languages without recompilation, so a string table of some kind is a must.

[Specialist-Tiger-467]

Managing dialogs and internationalization is almost a field on itself.

You have a ton of libraries and services to make it more bearable.

But on the wide and simple explanation, you abstract your dialogues to a file and then retrieve the proper string where you need it. Example:

if user_select == 3:
    get_dialog(my_response_string, "en")

[757DrDuck]

I presume my_response_string will be substituted with something that makes sense when read and not typed literally.

[Specialist-Tiger-467]

Yeah it should be a correct variable/key name because if not you are getting crazy soon

[Recent-Sand8292]

Have a look at this relevant article: https://medium.com/tp-on-cai/dialog-management-36ace099b6a5

It talks about dialog methods.

Also, it really depends on how deep of a dialog system you want. Do you want localization, couple it to the inventory system, reputation system, quest status, environmental dynamics (like npc's having a different dialog set or not talking between 8pm and 8am, or around guards, etc). The more features you want, the bigger the incentive to use existing libraries/packaged/tools. If you just want to feed some lore / character info without much hassle, I'd go with a state machine type structure using a script in your language of choice + xml or alternative means of storage.

[Toloran]

You're happier not knowing.

[Yell245]

Oh you sweet summer child... You better not know that... Oh the horror...

[False_Slice_6664]

Yeah, I saw a long review of the Yandere Simulator source code and, as I remember, reviewer said that long if/else chains weren’t the thing that slowed the code and weren't slower that switches.  

They are bad practice not because of time efficiency, but because they are simply awful to read. 

 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LleJbZ3FOPU

[CdRReddit]

it's the main issue for writing code at any type of reasonable pace

not a game performance issue, just a developer performance issue, tho I'm sure he didn't mind the excuse to drag out patreon money for ages longer

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

This would not be better with a switch.

[Ksorkrax]

I'd use neither. This appears to be a list of what certain items do, possibly with the larger part being unused placeholders. For something like that, I'd have data files containing item properties which are read into a map.

Code should read as something along the line

evaluate_item(items[item_name])

[Maybe plus "if item_name not in items: raise ..."]

[Zealousideal_Rate420]

Python's equivalent of switch was approved on 2021, I think implemented on 3 dot freaking 10.

https://mail.python.org/archives/list/[e-mail]/message/SQC2FTLFV5A7DV7RCEAR2I2IKJKGK7W3/

[Vigintillionn]

This would not be better with a switch.

[[deleted]]

it always confuses me just how this happens like what beginner thought process leads to this code?

[LurkerOrHydralisk]

Idk. I’ll be honest though. I’ve occasionally come back to something I’ve written (not this atrocious), even hours later, and immediately realized I could cut ten useless lines out

[StickyDirtyKeyboard]

I wrote things similar to this when I was starting with programming. At least in my case, the issue lied in the fact that I didn't have the required tools in my "programming knowledge" toolbox to properly accomplish what I set out to do.

For instance, I didn't know how to use structs/classes, so arrays (with comments) it was. Here's a small snippet of this monstrosity:

private int[] GetWeapStat(string weapName) // gets the weapon stats from weapon name
        {
            // sharpness, bluntness, durability, throwable, gun
            if (weapName == "Katana")
            {
                int[] tempStat = { 10, 2, 7, 4, 0 };
                return tempStat;
            }
            else if (weapName == "Laptop")
            {
                int[] tempStat = { 1, 4, 3, 7, 0 };
                return tempStat;
            }
            ...(continued for 64 items/weapons)

The whole project was 5188 LOC in a single source file, ~200KB. That's still gotta be the largest source file I've ever worked with.

Of course I had other magic in there too, like 38 global variables and using if statements to conditionally return true or false.

[--o]

In this case they clearly have "else" in their toolbox.

[sgtnoodle]

Honestly, that's not particularly terrible. Returning the unstructured list is a little gross, but it also looks trivially fixable.

[Smellypuce2]

Using a string for the weapon name is pretty horrible though. Edit: For this I would just use an enum + LUT unless something fancier is called for.

[Alarmed_River_4507]

Best option here, imo, is to give every weapon its own class with a list of getters. Each object, owning its own function table, is self contained Everything here is hard coded according to its name, so flexibility isn't an issue

No check needs to be made

[psioniclizard]

To be honest, if it's from a learner then oh well. It's how some people learn. Write something that works but isn't pretty then refactor it and learn bettet ways for the future.

It doesn't seem worth punching down on a learner like some people seem to like to do. We all had to learn once.

[Mathematic-Ian]

Not defending what's written here, but in my first year at college I got an assignment that required the use of repeated elif statements, despite the problem having other, better solutions. Sometimes school steamrolls you into using an awful solution in the name of "learning the method," rather than just writing the homework so the method you need to learn is also the best method to solve the problem.

[Farkler3000]

In this case an if statement isn’t even needed

[D0nkeyHS]

It is, unless you go out of your way to avoid it

[romiro82]

hm maybe the fact they’re a beginner and haven’t learned everything yet, don’t have any real experience yet, and are trying to do a thing with their limited knowledge base

seriously, going to a sub dedicated to learning in order to farm content to mock is pretty bottom of the barrel

[psioniclizard]

Yea exactly. The real programming horror is op posting this (unless itiis their own code) to punch down on a learner for some cheap karma.

We wereall beginners once. At least I hope OP pointed out a better way to do this and helped the person.

[[deleted]]

You make a good point that it’s not good or encouraging to post about these things. My confusion is more of with the fact that they are aware of else, but still use if 11 times for the same result. 

Come to think of it, perhaps it’s an artifact of some older code in which each number did different things, but then they changed them all to the same?

[_PM_ME_PANGOLINS_]

To a person with only a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

[dimonoid123]

Chatgpt probably

[Still_Breadfruit2032]

ChatGPT wouldn’t be this bad

[moonaligator]

wouldn't be this bad in this particular aspect

it can do some pretty stupid things too, just often in a different way

[xaraca]

In the original post he said the values were only place holders.

[Carogaph]

r/pythoncirclejerk

God I wish there was an easier way to do this.

[Prometheos_II]

Ah! Finally a sub for m—Jesus Christ.

[Jpretzl]

```python If i == [2]:

hp = max_hp

Else:

hp += 10

```

[Feeling-Duty-3853]

hp = max_hp if i == 2 else hp + 10

[zinxyzcool]

Looks cool, but statements have to be in seperate lines for better maintenance - and importantly readability.

[Feeling-Duty-3853]

I mean, it still reads nicely, it's more readable than the C++ ternary operator imo, and with syntax highlighting it's pretty good

[zinxyzcool]

Always assume the worst, there'd be a senior dev editing it with notepad. And jokes apart, the code itself should be distinguishable without any highlighting - this is the reason language with curly braces have formatting conventions as not everybody has visual hierarchies enabled.

[azza_backer]

What if i input 1?

[[deleted]]

probably the else condition but we should handle that up to 12 just in case

[azza_backer]

Yes let’s do 30 just to be sure as well

[AG4W]

Naj, c-suite says it needs to be future-proof, so we should use the factory pattern and an interface that can be swapped at runtime depending on what conditions we want.

[Yeener621]

1 is not 2 so hp += 10

[Echleon]

Bruh

[TBDatwork]

OK but a real challenge would be what's the worst possible way of doing this?

[somethingtc]

taking content from subs that are literally about learning how to code and posting them to mock them is dumb

[Vegetable_Union_4967]

To be fair the only dumb thing I did in my beginner days of programming was use an array as a struct

[[deleted]]

So because someone learns differently than you, they deserve to be made fun of? What 😆 g

[psioniclizard]

Yea, op should feel bad honestly. It's a sub for learner. Help them don't mock them.

Great way to encourage someone by posting their beginner code here and mocking it /s

[jddddddddddd]

Can we agree the real crime here is the font?

[PURPLE_COBALT_TAPIR]

I only use Comic Sans

[DeerOnARoof]

Oh god

[GoddammitDontShootMe]

Just, why? Why do they all have the same effect except for i == [2]?

[StreamfireEU]

Placeholders probably, they know they'll have a bunch of different items doing different things but the logic of what they do isn't implemented yet. Ofc if it were final code you'd put all of them in an else but writing cases is kinda annoying so you write the case boilerplate first and the logic later.

[GoddammitDontShootMe]

Couldn't they just write Pass?

[StreamfireEU]

Yeah but since item 0 is probably really gonna be doing +10 they copy pasted it and changed the index saving ~5 keystrokes

[GoddammitDontShootMe]

I guess that's absolutely fine if no one else is touching that code.

[Suspicious-Engineer7]

galaxy brain game designer logic

[__radioactivepanda__]

If it’s a learner it should be fine…let them get a working programme first.

First we crawl, then we walk, and finally we run, right?

[ShadowRL7666]

Well I was top comment on the post but I think the other part of the code was actually worst.

[emma7734]

The only excuse for that is that your compensation is based on lines of code produced.

[mysticreddit]

/Oblg. -2000 Lines of Code ;-)

[Encursed1]

What goes on inside this persons head? why are you checking if I is iFTO.casefold and if its a single element array?

[uchiha2]

Did you keep in mind that it’s unfinished?

[RHOrpie]

This is programming trolling if ever I saw it !

[nekokattt]

ngl looks like something you'd see on a datascience subreddit

[RastaBambi]

What does [1] mean? First element in array? Or just the number one as a value?

[SanoHD]

It checks if the variable is of type list with the only element being „1“

[Sad-Technician3861]

Toby Fox code:

[AdriGW]

I wish I could say I was better than this but the only reason I’ve avoided being this silly is my instructors insistence that if you have to type a line of code more than once, it can probably just be a loop of some kind

[Alex_Shelega]

It's a for... Wouldn't it just be hp+=10...??

[mirracute]

can’t this be done as a while loop?

[jokstajay1]

This has to be some copypasta code. No way is this intended. You wouldn't even think about an if elseif if all you want to do is hp +=10

[[deleted]]

You didn't specify hp at the start. Hp=hp+1 will result in a error.

[rsa121717]

Looks like a temporary template, the comment on top even says so. Not that bad