Just wrote my 1000th line of code and it was all a typo

I was so pumped to hit that number in my first Python project, a simple text game. I spent like an hour just staring at the screen feeling like a genius. Then I ran it and got a syntax error because I'd spelled 'print' as 'pint' on line 1000. Has anyone else had a big win turn into a facepalm moment this fast?

3 comments

3 Comments

derekp702mo ago

My first big coding project was a budget tracker in college. I stayed up all night to finish the final report function, about 200 lines of logic. I was so proud I emailed the file to my professor a week early. He wrote back five minutes later to say the whole program crashed because I'd used a single equals sign in an 'if' statement on line one. That high to low feeling is the worst.

faith_perez23d ago

I read something a while back about how even senior devs still make these dumb mistakes, it's apparently just part of the job. @derekp70 that story about your budget tracker is brutal, a single equals sign on line one after all that work... oof. I've started doing a quick scan of my new code before I run it just to see if anything obvious jumps out now, it's saved me a few times. Still, hitting that 1000 line milestone is something, even if a 'pint' brought you back down to earth.

michaelrodriguez2mo ago

Been there. I once spent a whole afternoon debugging only to find I'd used a comma instead of a period. Now I run my code after every few lines to catch those little mistakes early.