Spent 3 hours debugging a missing semicolon and learned something weird about Python

So I'm doing this little Python project for fun, right? Just a simple script to sort my book collection by author. I wrote like 30 lines of code, ran it, and got this ugly error about something being undefined. I spent probably 3 hours checking every line, even rewrote the whole thing from scratch. Turns out I forgot a colon after my function definition, not even a semicolon. Python doesn't use semicolons much anyway. But the weird part? The error message pointed to a completely different line than where the colon was missing. I figured out that Python's parser gets confused sometimes and points you somewhere else. Has anyone else run into misleading error messages like that? What do you do when the computer straight up lies about where the problem is?

2 comments

2 Comments

william_miller1mo ago

That bit about the error pointing to a different line really hit home for me. I've started printing out the actual line numbers in my code and cross-referencing them with the error traceback, which helped me catch a few false leads. Also, running my script through a linter like pylint before executing it has saved me from chasing ghosts more times than I can count.

sammurray1mo ago

Man, I used to be one of those people who just ignored linters because I thought they were overkill or just making things slower. But after a few too many hours tracking down bugs that were just dumb typos or missing imports, I finally caved and now I won't run anything without running pylint first. It cuts down on so much of that guessing game.