That moment my whole project went sideways because of one forgotten semicolon

I'm not a professional coder, just someone messing around with Python for a little side project. Last Tuesday I spent about 4 hours trying to figure out why my script kept crashing halfway through. I checked and re-checked everything, googled error messages, even asked my buddy who works in IT. Turns out I forgot a single semicolon inside a nested loop. One stupid character. I had to walk away and make a cup of coffee before I threw my laptop out the window. After that I went through line by line with a highlighter, which felt dumb but worked. Has anyone else had a tiny typo eat up hours of your day like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

barbaraw4729d ago

Four hours for a semicolon? Oh man, I feel that pain deep in my bones. Did you at least find it before or after you had the coffee? I've been there with a missing closing bracket that took me three days to spot because it was hiding in a block of copy-pasted code from Stack Overflow. My trick now is to print out the code on paper and go over it with a red pen like some kind of detective.

claire_walker29d ago

@barbaraw47 the red pen method is unhinged but honestly genius. Mine's highlighter and sticky notes, feel like a detective too.

blake_bell2929d ago

Printing it out with a red pen is wild, you must really hate debugging!