Yup. I stopped following Go when that happened. Not intentionally but adding yet more things (invisible ones, no less) that I need to be wary of is not what I consider convenience in a syntax. Other more awkward languages became less inconvenient to use and I just stopped using Go.

I probably would have kept at it a bit longer if the dev team was more accepting of feedback presented in good faith. I'm not really surprised -- it's often hard to tell the difference between fruitless bikeshedding and oh guys FYI you might consider this a problem, I do.

I am biased towards semis though, when I first saw OCaml's ';;' I was pleased.

Try as I might, I can't convince myself that semicolon insertion is something that I care about. Maybe I already have the One True Format trained into me, but I don't think I've ever had to think about or know the rules for semi-colon insertion. All I know is that I don't need to end things with ";" unless I'm trying to cram multiple things on a line, which I never am.

That said, I remember seeing something about a way that semi-colon insertion leads to the possibility of a misleading "if", but I can't find it anymore.

It's a lot more systematic than in JavaScript, rather similar to Python's semicoloning rules.

Agreed. It achieves a marginal increase in readability at the cost of all kinds of screwy implicit behavior. I like languages with dumb syntax that editors and IDEs can understand.