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My first website broke because I forgot one semicolon
Last Tuesday I was working on my first real project, a simple personal page with a contact form. I spent 3 hours trying to figure out why the submit button just did nothing. Turns out I missed a semicolon at the end of a line in the JavaScript. I felt pretty dumb but it taught me to check line by line when stuff breaks. Has anyone else spent way too long on a tiny typo?
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ivan4628d agoTop Commenter
Oh man, I read somewhere that a missing semicolon brought down a major airline's booking system for a whole afternoon. It's wild how one tiny character can cause that much trouble.
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emma_lee228d ago
@ivan462 yeah I heard about that too! Apparently it was a missing semicolon in some old COBOL code that took down the entire system. One tiny little character and suddenly NOBODY could book flights. Really makes you appreciate the programmers who have to dig through thousands of lines of code looking for stuff like that.
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david_palmer8d ago
Actually I think that airline story involved a missing semicolon in a C++ module, not COBOL. It was Southwest Airlines back in 2015 or so, and the bug was in their flight scheduling system. The semicolon was supposed to be at the end of a line in a loop, and without it the code just kept running past where it should have stopped, eventually crashing the whole thing. Took their IT team about 4 hours to find it buried in like 200,000 lines of code.
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