Spent 6 hours trying to debug a code issue that turned out to be a missing semicolon

That one little character ate my whole afternoon and made me feel like I need to double-check the basics before diving into complicated fixes, has anyone else had a tiny thing waste way too much of your time?

3 comments

3 Comments

hollyl251d ago

Yeah but was it a semicolon you missed or did you just assume you had it right and skip over it like four times? I swear half the time I waste is just me being too stubborn to triple check the obvious stuff.

william_harris1d agoMost Upvoted

Wait, you actually found a missing semicolon? Like a real one that broke something? I've heard stories about those things but I've never actually seen one in the wild. Most of my bugs are just me forgetting a closing bracket or writing a variable name wrong and then blaming the compiler for an hour. I bet you felt like a genius when you finally spotted it though, even if you wanted to throw your keyboard at the wall first. Those little punctuation marks have cost me more hours than I'd like to admit too.

taylorshah1d ago

Oh man, I gotta disagree with you on this one. Semicolons are actually kind of overrated, right? I mean, half the time when people blame a missing semicolon, it's really just their IDE formatting being weird or they're using a language that doesn't even need them in the first place. Python's been around for decades and nobody's crying over not having to type those little dots every five lines. Actually, you know what, I think the whole mystique around semicolons is just programmers' way of making themselves feel like they're solving some big mystery when really it's just a typo. But hey, if hunting for them makes you feel like a detective, more power to you I guess.