Here’s the code:
Playing Python blackjack is super fun. It’s a good thing that I don’t gamble, though, because I’m not very good at it.
I started working on this program last week by planning out how I might create a more realistic deck of cards on a piece of paper. By working on paper, I was able to refine my ideas before I started in Trinket. Then, I conceived of the game as a series of while loops. It wasn’t until later that I realized that I needed all those while loops to be within a main while loop to restart the game. Even later, I figured out that only some of the while loops were necessary for tasks that needed to repeat. I feel like that should have been obvious to me from the beginning, but live and learn.
Milestones:
- Create cardlist
- Create players/dealers list to keep cards
- Create players/dealers list to display sum
- Hit/stay loop
- Dealer’s loop
- Calling loop
- Figure out how to start a new game
- Clean it up with helper.py
Since I got everything to work this weekend, I have tried to structure my code so that it is readable. Mission not totally accomplished. I have a lot of variables and I haven’t been able to import them them all from the helper code into main.py. I got some help at the clinic after class, but that revealed that I need a stronger understanding of ‘return’ and how to implement functions.
In the future, I think that I will try to be more disciplined about how I construct my program. Instead of waiting until it works to replace bits of code with functions, I will try to make them work along the way. In addition, I would like to build on this code by introducing some sort of scoreboard. I may not have a strong enough grasp on the concept of gambling to implement betting, but I could probably figure out how to construct logic that determine whether an Ace (just a 1 in my program) should be an 11. I could also work on the user interface. For this project, I went for simple, clean, and intuitive, rather than clever. Those are achievable elaborations that I could have added with more time and patience.