Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ajross | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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