Today I have learned something very powerful that I wanted to share with you!
Did you know you could pass a map into a function and get the key values?
This is brand new information! for me, let me give you this example:
(defn print-person [person]
(println (:name person) "is" (:age person) "years old."))
In this function, person is a hashmap that contains information about a person. The function print-person takes this hashmap as an argument and uses the keys :name and :age to retrieve the relevant information.
Refactoring for Efficiency
Refactoring has been the story of my life for the past few weeks.
Take a look at this old code:
(defn game-over? [grid token-1 token-2]
(or
(token-wins grid token-1)
(token-wins grid token-2)
(tie grid))
It was very simple, however I had to pass in the board and the tokens.
Now I only have to pass in a map called game and the new functions will do the rest.
(defn player-token [player] (:token player player))
(defn game-over?
([{:keys [board player-1 player-2]}] (game-over? board player-1 player-2))
([grid player-1 player-2]
(let [player-1 (player-token player-1)
player-2 (player-token player-2)]
(or
(token-wins grid player-1)
(token-wins grid player-2)
(tie grid)))))
This allows me to get the values that are important easily.
This also allows my game loop to be efficient and readable.
As I continue to refactor and improve my code, I’ve stumbled upon new challenges and learned new things. That’s the beauty of programming - there’s always something new to learn and a better way to do things.
Best,
Merl