julia_lee•2mo agoMost Upvoted

Warning: I spent 6 hours debugging a single missing semicolon in JavaScript

It took me that long to find it because I was looking at the wrong part of the code, and now I triple check every line before I run anything.

3 comments

3 Comments

gavina732mo ago

Used to be all smug about semicolons being optional in JS. Then I spent 45 minutes chasing a bug that only showed up in Safari and suddenly I'm a semicolon truther.

milesj701mo ago

Oh man, been there. I started putting semicolons at the end of every line that doesn't end with a curly brace just to be safe. It's one of those things where you learn the hard way that "optional" really means "optional until it isn't

oscar_ellis2mo ago

The prettier plugin saved my sanity on this exact thing. Just set it up to auto-add semicolons on save (took like 2 minutes) and I never think about it anymore. Safari specifically is the worst about line break parsing, especially when you have something like a return statement with a newline. Honestly, I'd rather let the tool handle it than have another 45 minute debugging session.