Why does nobody talk about the 'forgot a semicolon' error when you're starting out?

My first Python script crashed for an hour yesterday because I used a colon instead of a semicolon in a single line. What's the most annoying simple mistake you've made recently?

3 comments

3 Comments

gray_morgan2mo ago

Oh man, that's the worst. It's always the tiny stuff that kills you. Spent twenty minutes last week because I had a single equals sign instead of double in an if statement. The error message made zero sense, just pointed to the wrong line entirely. Makes you want to throw your laptop sometimes.

reese_lee92mo ago

Ugh, tell me about it, @gray_morgan. I once spent a whole hour looking for a missing semicolon. The whole hour. My brain just refused to see it. I mean, you stare at the same lines so long they stop making sense. I was fully convinced my code was haunted or something. Makes that laptop-tossing feeling way too real.

charles_young922mo ago

Actually, a missing semicolon wouldn't usually cause an error in Python. Maybe it was a different language? That ghost in your machine might have been something else.