Hit a wall with my first Python loop at 2 AM and it made me rethink everything

I was coding in my tiny apartment kitchen around 2 AM last Tuesday, trying to get a simple for loop to work for a beginner project I found. I had this idea to print out items from a list, but every time I ran it, I got a syntax error. It turned out I forgot a colon after the for statement, something so basic I felt stupid for 20 minutes. I sat there staring at the screen, coffee gone cold, and finally saw it when I checked a YouTube tutorial from a guy named Alex. The fix took three seconds once I spotted it, but the whole thing felt like climbing a mountain for no reason. Has anyone else had a dumb coding mistake that took way too long to figure out?

2 comments

2 Comments

hill.hugo1mo ago

Ugh, yeah I remember staring at a simple if statement for like an hour because I put a semicolon where a colon should be. What finally clicked for me was breaking the code down into really tiny pieces and running each one. Like instead of trying to loop through a whole list, I just tried printing one item from the list first to see if the list was even set up right. Once that worked, then I added the loop line by line. How did you finally figure out that colon thing was the problem?

coleman.jamie1mo ago

Wait, did you ever accidentally delete something important while you were trying to test those tiny pieces? Because one time I was so proud of myself for debugging this little loop, but then I ran a test and it just wiped out my whole database table instead of printing one row. I mean, I was being so careful and breaking everything down like you said, but I forgot that my test script had a "delete all" command right at the top from an old project. It was a mess, but at least I learned to read the whole script before hitting run.