Spent 3 hours debugging a missing semicolon in JavaScript last night

I was working on a simple calculator app for my first real project. Everything looked fine to me but the code just wouldn't run. After staring at it for what felt like forever, I finally noticed I forgot a semicolon on line 47. My husband laughed when I told him, but honestly it made me realize how much one tiny character matters. I started using a linter plugin after that and it caught three other small errors right away. Anyone else have a moment where one small typo drove you crazy?

3 comments

3 Comments

mitchell.thomas2d ago

Line 47 is exactly where I always find my missing semicolons too, it's like the universe picks that spot on purpose. Ever since I turned on my editor's error highlighting, I save at least an hour a week hunting down tiny typos.

abbyf792d agoMost Upvoted

@mitchell.thomas absolutely nailed it with the error highlighting point. I used to waste half my Monday mornings staring at line 47 thinking I had a logic bug when it was just a stupid missing semicolon or a bracket that got deleted by accident. Turning on those editor warnings cut my debugging time by hours every week. It catches stuff like mismatched quotes and trailing commas too, not just semicolons. The red squiggly line under a variable name that doesn't exist yet is honestly better than any coffee for waking me up. I'd say anyone still coding without these turned on is just making their life harder than it needs to be.

milesbarnes2d ago

Turning on those editor warnings cut my debugging time by hours every week" is probably the truest thing I've read all day. I used to think I was too good for linting until I spent three hours on a missing parenthesis. Now I just let the computer do the boring work so I can focus on stuff that actually matters.