[wiremine]

This is pretty close. I once spent 4 hours in college (circa 1997) looking for an error in a C++ program. The compiler's error messages were rubbish.

It ended up being a missing semicolon in an odd spot and the compiler was just confused.

I remember walking homing thinking, "hey, if I can survive that, maybe I can just hack this CS thing..."

[zikzak]

I once spent a couple hours debugging a perl cgi script. Nothing worked. Called in my colleague. Looks fine. We both were tearing our hair out. Sent it to the line printer, ordered pizza, and one of us read the code while the other typed it in. Couple hours later we finished and it worked.

[tuveson]

C compilers will still shit themselves and give meaningless error messages if you forget a semicolon after a function declaration in a header file.

[fragmede]

Oof. Microcontrollers? LLVM and Clang has improved the situation somewhat for the rest of the world.