Programming can be a pain in the ass for the dumbest reasons
I'm sure anyone who has programmed before has had a brain-fart moment that makes them feel like a fool.
I just had one.
I'm programming in something called PICO-8, which is this cool "fantasy console" to make retro games in a limited setting1.
I'm following a written tutorial for some nifty animation stuff. I'm going through it trying to get the desired outcome (a fun text animation) and it just does. not. work. at all.
I don't know what's wrong with it. I'm looking at the tutorial text, line by line, character by character, and I'm sure I've written everything correctly. I do this multiple times because there must be something wrong. I think maybe the tutorial is out-of-date but that's not the issue.
I go "Okay, the text isn't animating so there must be something wrong with the drawing / animation code." Can't figure it out. "Maybe there's something wrong with the update code?" Nah, can't see anything. "How about when I initialize the variables?" Nada.
I'm tearing my hair out for about fifteen minutes. Losing my mind over here. I eventually just copy-and-paste the tutorial code, comment out my code, and run it. It works perfectly. So there must be something wrong on my end.
I spend another five minutes before I realized something. I misspelled a word.
Of course. A spelling mistake. The bane of my existence when it comes to programming. I literally misspelled "update" as "udpate." I mixed up the p and d. I felt so freaking stupid. I spent like twenty minutes trying to figure out what the crap is going on and I find it's just a simple spelling error.
I'm so dumb, man. It doesn't help that PICO-8, to my knowledge, doesn't have autocorrect. The whole interface is purposefully low-resolution, so errors like this are hard to spot. It didn't send out an error telling me which line of code was messed up either. I was lost at sea with no lighthouse.
Anyway, that annoyed me a lot. So much so that I had to take a break and now I'm writing this to decompress. Or decompose at this point.