Everyone says start with Python but a missing comma in my first script ate 3 days

Victor Ellis · 2026-10-29T09:40:04.977651+00:00

I keep seeing people tell new coders to just jump into Python and figure it out, and I'll push back on that a little. My first real script was a little weather thing I was building in March, maybe 40 lines, and it kept crashing with a syntax error I could not find. I stared at it for 3 nights after work, rewrote chunks of it twice, and even reinstalled Python thinking something was broken on my end. The whole time the problem was a single comma missing in a list on line 12 that the error message pointed at, but I did not know how to read the error message yet. That was the real issue, nobody had shown me how to actually read what the terminal was telling me. Three days gone over one keystroke, and I almost quit that week. So my hot take is the language matters way less than someone sitting down and walking you through how to debug, and I wish a course had said that up front. What was the dumbest bug that cost you the most time when you were starting out?

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Everyone says start with Python but a missing comma in my first script ate 3 days | Coding For Beginners - Hub Chatter