Took me 6 hours to fix one missing semicolon in PHP

I was following a tutorial to build a simple login form and my code kept throwing a white screen error. Turns out I forgot a semicolon after a require statement on line 17, and I didn't spot it until I copied the code into an online syntax checker. Has anyone else spent way too long hunting down tiny typos like that?

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3 Comments

dakota_taylor394mo ago

Real talk - that 20% stat is way off. More like 80% if you're new and don't know where to look yet.

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anna5675mo ago

Read somewhere that devs spend like 20% of their time just hunting down missing semicolons.

7

leep895mo ago

Most of that time is actually just waiting for the linter to run, not hunting.

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