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Comment by courtewing | Hacker News Reader

I agree with you to a certain extent, but I do think it is important to distinguish between those that think that they should just use a semi-colon and those that seek to disrespect a standard.

In my case, and I've seen this sentiment expressed repeatedly by others on HN, I think it is odd that a minification script would actively choose not to support a syntax that is standards compliant. On the other hand, I think it is crazy for a major project to use a valid syntax that not only breaks said [popular] minifier but also offers no noticeable benefit.

I do not feel as if I'm disrespecting any standard just because I think simply adhering to that standard is not a sufficient justification for doing something.

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But "no noticeable benefit" is your aesthetic decision, not an objective truth. Not everyone feels the same. Pythonistas, for example, might quibble with you about that, because they skip semis when typing all the time and will experience editor friction when using Javascript. And even if you think it's "crazy" to skip the semicolons, you might not think it's crazy to write something like "test && result" as a simple if. Shell and perl programmers like that sort of thing and can read it without difficulty.

I'm not saying that all working code is good code, or that you have to actually use all the language features in all your code, or that you can't have your own well-reasoned opinions about this stuff. What I am saying is that if you're serious about using "Javascript" and interacting with the broader community of "Javascript" programmers, this kind of feature pedantry is going to hurt you and the community badly. You will constantly be running into useful (maybe even brilliant) code that does "crazy" things.

Interesting point, and I do hope that no one ever takes one of my opinions as an objective truth. That said, I do feel strongly that if the only benefit you can name about writing code in one particular manner is that it is aesthetically pleasing to you, then that is hardly a benefit at all.

When it comes to this particular case, I've heard a few different arguments for why the syntax they use is poor, including the following:

1. The syntax relies on parsing behavior that is expected to change in the future.

2. The syntax they use does not work in one of the major minifiers used throughout the community (the crux of the whole issue to begin with, but certainly a drawback in and of itself)

I have yet to hear any benefit to NOT including a semi-colon to resolve this issue beyond aesthetics, and aesthetics alone is just not a rationalization that I can get behind.

I do feel strongly that if the only benefit you can name about writing code in one particular manner is that it is aesthetically pleasing to you

Isn't that exactly what's happening here? A bunch of people piling on skipped semicolons and infix if's because they think they're "sloppy"? Refusing to support ASI (which is, in fact, precisely specified) in their transformation tools because it's "broken"? Why are some people's aesthetics more important than others?

Again: you use the language you have. You will never get the community on board your private yacht of your "sane subset" Javascript. It's been tried for decades. It doesn't work.

As a Pythonista, I beg you to leave me out of this. I love Python's syntax but I can see Javascript's semicolon insertion is awful.

>>On the other hand, I think it is crazy for a major project to use a valid syntax that not only breaks said [popular] minifier but also offers no noticeable benefit.

That's basically the take-away I got from yesterday's semicolon drama. You can appreciate that JS allows you to omit semicolons or you can bash those who choose the ambiguous over the explicit. But if you're the lead on a hugely successful project you should pick the syntax that will make it work everywhere. It's especially odd for a web developer to choose aesthetics over pragmatics when it comes to things like this.

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