Serious question: how long did you spend debugging a single missing bracket or semicolon before you realized it?

I spent 3 hours last night staring at a Python script that kept throwing a syntax error on line 47. Turned out I was missing a closing parenthesis from a function call on line 12. My editor didn't flag it and I manually traced through 30 lines before seeing it. I'm taking a poll here: is it better to catch these by reading line by line or do you just run a linter from the start and call it a day? Has anyone else been burned by something that simple wasting a whole evening?

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gavin801mo ago

Oh man, I feel this so hard. Last week I spent like 40 minutes hunting a bug in some JavaScript and it was just me using a single equals sign instead of triple equals in a conditional. My cat was judging me the whole time.