Was at a library workshop in Denver and someone showed me their broken code line by line.

Seeing the exact spot where a missing semicolon crashed their whole program made debugging click for me. Anyone have a simple trick for spotting those tiny syntax errors faster?

3 comments

3 Comments

victor_jones9921d ago

My old CS prof swore by reading code backwards to catch missing punctuation.

nathan_shah20d ago

Yeah, I get the idea @victor_jones99, but reading backwards never clicked for me. It pulls the logic apart when you need to see how it flows together. I'd rather just run a linter to catch a missing semicolon. For a missing bracket, I find it faster to trace from the start of a function block forward, matching them in my head as I go. That way I'm still following the actual order of the code.

sam_thomas20d ago

Wait, your prof actually made you read code backwards? That sounds like a special kind of torture, @victor_jones99. My brain would just shut down trying to parse anything that way. Honestly, just scanning the screen while the IDE highlights matching braces works way better for me.