Three hours debugging a missing semicolon last Thursday

I spent three hours last Thursday staring at a Python script that just would not run. Turned out I forgot a single semicolon in a line where I was trying to chain two statements together, which broke everything. I checked the indentation, the variable names, even reinstalled a library. My friend came over, looked at it for 30 seconds, and pointed it out right away. Felt like such a rookie mistake after three months of learning. It was really frustrating but also a good reminder to slow down and check the basics first. Has anyone else wasted a ton of time on something this small?

2 comments

2 Comments

beth_hunt19d ago

Gotta push back on this one, I'm not buying that a semicolon broke Python. Python doesn't use semicolons as statement terminators like C or Java, you can use them to put two statements on one line but they're totally optional. If you missed one in a chained line, your script would've thrown a syntax error at that exact spot, not some random mystery bug. You'd see the error line and the missing colon character right there in the traceback. I've made dumber mistakes like naming a variable "list" and overriding the built-in, or indenting with a tab when the rest was spaces. That stuff takes forever to catch because the error message doesn't help much. Did the traceback actually point to the line or did it just say "invalid syntax"?

blair_davis5019d ago

Oh man, that "naming a variable list" bit hit me right in the gut. I did that exact same thing three months ago and spent an entire Saturday trying to figure out why my program suddenly forgot how lists work. The traceback made it look like a library conflict, not my dumb naming choice. I also once mixed tabs and spaces in a single if block, and the error message just pointed to the first line of the function with no help at all. It's always the tiny things that cost the most time, and you feel like a complete idiot when someone else spots it in ten seconds.