Stayed up until 3am chasing a missing semicolon in my Python script and found 4 other bugs along the way

I was working on my first calculator program at my kitchen table last night, forgot a semicolon in line 47, and after an hour of staring at it I finally found it hidden in a messy indent pattern, so now I'm wondering does anyone else get lost in small errors like that or do you just start fresh?

3 comments

3 Comments

margaret_jackson7322d ago

Did you ever read that thing about how our brains basically autocomplete what we expect to see? It's like when you're reading a book and skip over a typo because you know what word is supposed to be there. Same thing happens with code, you see what you intended to write instead of what's actually on the screen. And yeah, @simonb92's "flase" story is exactly that, your brain just fills in the letters because it knows the word "false" so well. I feel like the late night coding makes it ten times worse too, your eyes start glazing over around 2am.

simonb921mo ago

Found a "flase" in my login script once, kept wondering why it wouldn't authenticate.

nancy5241mo ago

Ever notice how bugs hide in plain sight, like they know you're tired? I spent two hours once hunting a typo in a config file, turns out I'd written "flase" instead of "false" right at the top. You get so focused on the code that your eyes just skip over the obvious stuff.