dnd-character: Suggestions for improving constructor in stub and in reference solution

Mayur on Slack said that the DND Character exercise was hard to figure out.

I suspect that adding a constructor to the stub file would improve the situation.

As for the modifier method, shouldn’t this be a static method?

And as for the reference solution, I would suggest the improvement to have Random dependency-injected into the constructor, since otherwise you can only do probabilistic testing, as is done now.

[sshine]

Regarding the modifier method, why would you declare this method static?

Because it depends on only its input, not on any object properties.

Since you don’t need the context of an object to compute the function, the minimal implementation would be a static method.

Compare this to the Haskell solution, the C# solution and the Python solution where they’re respectively a pure function independent of the Character type, a static method, and a top-level definition independent of the Character class. The closest of these to the Java track would be the C# one, I think.

[sshine]

I don’t think we should be pushing users towards a certain solution.

OK. I’m not sure I can imagine more than one solution besides the one where Random is injected into the constructor. The unit tests aren’t compatible with this type of solution, and I can’t imagine how it could be.

I believe I’ve left enough of an impression without contributing code to the solution, so I’ll bid you a good day now. 😄