I see programmer memes on a daily basis that have something to do with a missing semi-colon being impossible to find...

I see programmer memes on a daily basis that have something to do with a missing semi-colon being impossible to find. Those are mistakes that should be found instantly when you get an error message that basically says, "Hey fucktard, you missed the semi-colon on line 41, that's why there's red shit everywhere."

I've been programming for three years and not once have I had this problem, but I've only used MS Visual Studio. So please, one of you more experienced, perhaps older programmers out there, explain to me why this is an issue?

Are the Visual Studio devs the only guys smart enough to include a feature that checks for a semi-colon in their IDEs?

Are the memes made by idiots who have no idea what they're talking about?

Is the average programmer too stupid to interpret the error message?

Or maybe I've just been spoiled by modern environments, and all these memes are being perpetuated by ancient coders who reminisce about punch cards?

i think its just syntax in general

where did you get this 'meme' from? facebook?

Well, for the purposes of of this post, I Googled semi-colon memes, but this was a response to posts that I see nearly every day since I liked a whole bunch of programming pages. I figured exposing myself to more relevant material I could pull myself out of the lull I'm in, but it's been mostly toxic so far.

if you're not narrowing down the problem area via binary search, which for any size problem should only be a couple minutes, you are a shit programmer.

t. student

I think it's not about the lack of a semi-colon, but a badly place one that leads to a bug rather than a compilation error.

Think about how you can get fucked by a single typing error like :
> if( i = 0 )
drown in a big codebase.

I didn't even consider that, actually. Still, it seems like a semi-colon that you don't want would almost always produce a compilation error. IDK, I'll stop bitching at least. lol

I can't find a good example, but here's a dumb one :

> while(stuff);
> doThing();

You'll do thing once, given stuff goes false.

your memes indeed seem to be from facebook.
Anyway, I use Vim and sometimes vi, I am mainly a C programmer, and to answer your question, no, I can't recall ever having a problem with a semicolon that I can track. Whenever I've missed a semicolon (and the syntax coloring in Vim doesn't do what you claim about VS) I usually do get the line where the error is.
I don't think it would be common for a runtime error to be triggered by a semicolon either, for semantic units are usually distinguishable enough from one another
foo(this) /* Compiler will immediately trigger this one */
bar(that);
int a
b = 5;
/* Either you're referencing an undeclared variable or you're implicitly typecasting (which will trigger a warning at least) */
for (i = 0; i++ i

I understand why people swear to Yoda conditions

if (0 = i) // compilation error
if (0 == i) // works fine

I'm pretty sure clang and gcc have warnings for this. I think they added it around a year or so ago.

Indeed, with -Wparentheses.

The million dollar bug.

Programmer and web dev are infected by people who don't know anything about the field, and don't care, except for the fact that it pays higher than whatever shit job they were at before. Their hope is to lie their ass off and be paid by some huge company and that they can just make excuses for 2-3 years before they finally realize they are worthless.

Other than that, you also see unemployables try to code in hipster "IDE"s or try to think they're better than you by not using one at all, or some 80s shit like emacs or vi/m. That is where you will also see 101 level mistakes about missing semicolons.

Basically OP, everybody else ITT and this whole board is fucking STUPID.

Two things:
1) Image macros ("memes") like OP's are lowest-common-denominator humor, and LCD humor is often exaggerated for effect.
2) People who laugh at "memes" are not only responding to the presented situation but also the sentiment behind it. In the OP example, the situation can be generalized to "A simple mistake held me back." Most people who see the meme have probably experienced that and can relate.

t. someone who unironically enjoys imgur

There's probably better, less memetic programming discussion on reddit to be honest, if not lobste.rs

You haven't posted any memes. Just pictures with words slapped on

It could be an exaggeration. Or it could be idiots who use sublime or vim with no linting.

if the debugger tools are so fucking good then why did it not just place the missing semicolon in the proper location for you?

Because that could possibly change the meaning of your program without you intending to.

The memes aren't about what they say on the tin. They're not trying to actually be relatable. They're subconsciously making vaguely relatable sound noises about programmery things like semicolons and braces and debuggers and shit in order to try to fit in with programmery people.

I like your taste in code senpai.

why not let the debugger write all the code?