It's not about showing off, it's about showing someone who is by his own admission not a great coder how to do something that could improve his game. If you know how to do something, and someone seems to think it's way harder than it really is, why wouldn't you share that knowledge with them?
(Incidentally, forgive my ignorance of python, but would that way actually work? Don't the keys of a map have to be unique?)
My gripe was more with the tone of the post, which came up as unnecessarily smug and "yo in your face". Of course I might've been mistaken and you might've been concerned only in giving a hand, but it didn't seem like it, it looked to me more like a "look, I can code better than you".
Besides, my whole point was that in Runey's case his forte is the writing, so it's a wise choice for him to invest his time into that rather than in trying to figure out how to code minor details like this one. Two lines of code to select a different phrase are already too much for something so inconsequential, from a certain point of view. And his time is better spent elsewhere.
If he had a team and was not a solo dev, the critique would make sense, since there would be a coder to tackle this minor code details. But since he's a solo dev I think it's better for him to focus on the writing and to forgo this kind of inconsequential minor coding.
(To be honest, regarding that code, I've never used python seriously, so I don't have a better answer to your question than: I tested it quickly on my machine and it worked. I also tested the case in which two of those variables had the same value and it still gave an answer. I don't know how it reached said answer, but it was correct, so I deemed the code working as intended.
If I could've used another language I'd probably would've come with a better answer.)
