Spent 6 hours on a single loop yesterday

Realized my for loop had a stupid off-by-one error. Couldn't spot it until my buddy looked over my shoulder. Felt like a complete idiot. Has anyone else wasted a whole day on something this basic?

2 comments

2 Comments

spencer_sanchez671mo ago

Oh man, off-by-one errors are like the universe's way of testing your patience. I swear those things hide in plain sight on purpose. You stare at the code for hours and your brain just refuses to see it until someone walks by and points at it like "hey, that's wrong." It's honestly a rite of passage at this point. I've definitely spent a whole afternoon debugging a missing equals sign or a reversed less-than sign. Makes you wonder if the computer is gaslighting you.

ward.piper1mo ago

Oh man tell me about it. @spencer_sanchez67 hit it right on the head with that "gaslighting" comment. I read somewhere that our brains literally fill in what we expect to see when scanning code, so the computer keeps catching us off guard. I spent like 5 hours once on a Python loop that just needed a +1 tacked on the end. Felt so dumb when my coworker glanced at it for 2 seconds and fixed it.