TIL the week I spent 6 hours debugging a missing semicolon...

Last Tuesday I was following a Python tutorial on making a calculator app. Got to the end, hit run, and nothing worked. Spent three nights staring at the code before my buddy pointed out I forgot a semicolon on line 12. It made me wonder - is it better to learn by making these dumb mistakes or should tutorials hold your hand more? Anyone else have a bug that took way too long to find?

2 comments

2 Comments

miles2791mo ago

Man that sucks but honestly those dumb mistakes are how you actually learn. I spent a whole weekend once trying to figure out why my code kept crashing. Turned out I had an extra closing bracket that was throwing everything off. My advice is don't let tutorials hold your hand too much. The pain of finding those bugs yourself makes you remember not to do it again. Plus you get way better at reading error messages and tracing through your code. Yeah it's frustrating in the moment but that's how you build real skill.

the_mila1mo agoMost Upvoted

Hands-on experience is overrated when a good debugger and clear tutorials can save you hours of pointless frustration.