Spent 3 hours debugging a missing semicolon in JavaScript

I was working on a simple calculator project for my coding class and spent almost 3 hours trying to figure out why my button clicks weren't registering. Finally I noticed I forgot a semicolon after an if statement condition. My buddy laughed and said that's basically a rite of passage for beginners. Has anyone else wasted a ton of time on something this small?

2 comments

2 Comments

rowanjenkins4d ago

Yeah that thing about being tired after a long day of classes really hits home... I once spent a whole evening trying to figure out why my CSS grid wasn't working and turns out I had just typed "gird" instead of "grid" in the property name. It's funny how your brain just skips over your own mistakes when you're exhausted.

lee_ward544d ago

My buddy from study group had basically the exact same thing happen with a missing parenthesis in Python. He was building a little text based adventure game and spent like two whole evenings trying to figure out why his choices wouldn't lead anywhere. Turned out he just forgot a closing parenthesis on an input function call. He said he felt so dumb but it's pretty common for people just starting out, especially when you're tired after a long day of classes. The smallest things always seem to trip you up the most.