Spent 4 hours debugging a missing semicolon in Python

I was working on a little weather app for my local city, Denver, and kept getting this weird error about an invalid syntax. Figured I had a broken loop or something, so I rewrote half the code over two nights. Turns out I forgot a colon after an if statement in line 3. After 4 hours of staring at the screen, I finally caught it during a coffee break. Has anyone else wasted a whole evening on something this dumb?

2 comments

2 Comments

rileyjones1mo ago

Actually that missing colon thing is so common in Python it's almost a rite of passage lol. I bet a lot of those "4 hours of debugging" stories start with something just as basic as a simple typo.

henryreed1mo ago

Heard this story on a podcast about coding mistakes. This one guy spent a whole day trying to figure out why his script wouldn't run. Turns out he was using a regular equals sign instead of a double equals in an if statement. Just a single character off. Made me feel a lot better about my own dumb typos. My guess is half the stuff we spend hours on comes down to something that simple. But you know, that's how you learn I guess. Takes some people longer than others to remember the basic stuff.