This is an error that should probably have been caught just based upon the color of the text when it was typed/pasted into the source code. Of the uuid() call was in quotes, it would have appeared as text. When you’re blindly using so much copy/pasted code (regardless of the source), it’s really easy to miss errors like this.

But our existing tools are already built to help us avoid this.

Back in the day, I used a tool from a group in Google called “error-prone”. It was great at catching things like this (and Lorne goal NPE in Java). It would examine code before compiling to find common errors like this. I wish we had more “quick” check tools for more languages.