Vent: Spent 3 hours debugging a missing semicolon in my JavaScript code

I was working on a simple calculator project for my course last Tuesday. The thing just wouldn't run no matter what I tried. After checking every line like three times, my friend pointed out I forgot a semicolon after a variable assignment. It took me 3 whole hours to find that one tiny mistake. Has anyone else spent way too long on a simple syntax error like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

violamurray1mo ago

Have you tried using a linter to catch those little things before you even run the code?

simonp471mo ago

Totally this. I started using pylint on my Python projects last month and it caught like a dozen missing imports and unused variables I would have missed until runtime.