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Comment by cbb330 | Hacker News Reader

This opinion is ironic because this is exactly what the author intended to describe -- the typo IS hard to find.

The "Hello, World" example is nothing more than JSON, showing a string repeated 3 times. On the third time, "bill" is misspelled with "blil". The next tab shows how Dhall uses a variable definition to prevent this type of error.

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I too spent the whole time scrutinizing the syntax and ignoring the values, since this is an intro to the language and not to Bill’s dotfiles. I was ultimately unable to deduce the presumed syntax error and independently came to the same misconclusion.

It can't be a syntax error though as it evaluates successfully as demonstrated by the right-hand side.

In general, if you think that someone’s claimed experience doesn’t make sense, you’re probably just missing information.

On small viewports, the “right-hand side” is down page and off screen, and the instructions I’m following reference only tabs visible above.

I took it to mean "can you find the syntax error". It wasn't clear they meant the text

Yeah, I eventually caught it but wished I hadn't wasted my time on it - seems like something they could better have shown with an animation

Sure, but how do I know that the user doesn't store their public key in /home/blil?

I mean... from context, it's probably a mistake, but on the other hand we don't actually know the structure of that filesystem or the author's intentions.

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