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?

3 comments

3 Comments

dakota_taylor391mo ago

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

anna5672mo ago

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

leep892mo ago

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