What a difference a couple days (and some new skills) makes!

Author: Justin Kenyon

You may remember that just this last Saturday I wrote a blog post centered around sharing my progress publicly when coding. That day, I felt pretty accomplished because I succeeded in writing a hangman program. However, it really didn't feel "right" since the code was ugly and really wasn't as readable as a program written in Ruby should be. So, today I totally rewrote it with another member of my Metis cohort. During this exercise I had so many "Aha!" moments that I really feel I have reached a huge milestone in my understanding of Object-oriented programming. One of our instructors, Goose, described that icky feeling you get when writing code that works, but is just not as clean as you want it to be. That perfectly described how I felt about my last commit to my hangman.rb file on Saturday. Everything worked, the game could be played, but it was just plain... ugly! By writing code using OOP it really helps you step back and tackle one issue at a time and allows for complete readability.

This is, again, further than I have reached in any other programming language and my code is looking clean. And... I actually understand everything I am doing, which is a huge accomplishment in my mind.

You can check out my new hangman game here: Github: hangman_oop.rb

Or, just check out this code:

class Hangman
 MAX_GUESSES = 6
attr_reader :word, :guesses

def initialize(word)
    @word = word
    @guesses = []
end

 def play
 display_welcome_message

    until game_over?
     display_status
   ask_for_letter
    end

    display_result
  end

  private

  def display_result
    if winner?
      puts "You win!"
    else
      puts "You lose! The word was #{word.join}."
    end
  end

  def ask_for_letter
    print "> "
    guesses << gets.strip.downcase
    guesses.uniq!
  end

  def game_over?
    winner? || loser?
end

  def winner?
    (word - guesses).empty?
  end

  def loser?
    guesses_remaining == 0
  end

  def display_status
    display_turns_remaining
    display_guesses
    display_board
  end

  def display_guesses
    puts guesses.sort.join(" ")
  end

  def display_turns_remaining
    puts "#{guesses_remaining} guesses remaining"
  end

  def display_board
    word.each do |letter|
      if guesses.include? letter
        print "#{letter} "
      else
        print "_ "
      end
    end
    puts
  end

  def guesses_remaining
    MAX_GUESSES - incorrect_guesses
  end

  def incorrect_guesses
    (guesses - word).length
  end

  def display_welcome_message
    puts "Welcome to Hangman!"
  end
end

dictionary = []

file = File.open("/usr/share/dict/words", "r")
dictionary = file.to_a
word = dictionary.sample.strip.split("")

game = Hangman.new(word)
game.play

As fun as this command line Ruby stuff is, I am really looking forward to getting into Ruby on Rails soon!