Spent 3 hours chasing a missing semicolon last night

Finally found it hiding in a comment I'd accidentally left unclosed. Is this just a beginner thing or do experienced coders still have these moments?

2 comments

2 Comments

oliver81117d agoMost Upvoted

Man, I once spent like two hours debugging a loop that turned out to be broken because I typed a comma instead of a period in a float. The number went from 3.5 to 3,5 and the whole thing just silently crashed. My keyboard still has a dent from where I facepalmed. It's definitely not just a beginner thing, I think we all get haunted by our own late-night typos forever.

stellacooper17d ago

You think that's bad? I once spent four hours looking for a bug that turned out to be me typing a lowercase 'l' where I needed a number '1'. It was in a variable name, looked exactly the same in the font I was using. Stuff like that never really stops happening, you just get better at finding them faster. The real trick is learning to check your own assumptions before you start digging. Like, I bet you assumed it was a logic problem first, right? We all do that, and then it ends up being some stupid typo you made at 2 AM.