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Comment by gtsop | Hacker News Reader

I used to be on the "always use semicolons" side of this argument. Having shipped multiple projects using both methods my verdict is clear: It doesn't matter. Why it doesn't matter you ask? Because 1) I am enforcing either decision with eslint rules and 2) i write unit tests 3) code is transpiled (thus semicolons are handled perfectly at the output). Having these three in place, I have yet to encounter a single "gotcha" out of omitting semicolons.

If for any reason you absolutelly can't have these in place, better be safe and use semicolons.

Edit: for the "gotcha" explained in the link, prettier will automatically insert a semicolon before the array.

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>I have yet to encounter a single "gotcha" out of omitting semicolons.

keyword "yet". It seems like such a insignificant win, with the downside being some very hard to debug runtime error because one element of your build chain has a bug or misses an edge case.

I honestly don't see the logic.

It just makes the code slightly easier to read. The semicolon is just noise.

Semicolons aren't noise; you've read the statement before you even get to them so how can they be noise? Noise would be type info added to languages that didn't have it before, such as TypeScript. Generics can get pretty gnarley too, when you have nested typing info involved.

Noise as in new line already terminates. That’s one reason Python and Ruby code are cleaner to read.

I disagree that the semicolon is noise Thought the Javascript interpretter (usually) does not need it the semicolon is good for humans who read the code after you Sure it is possible to read the code without the semicolons with some practice but the semicolons are standard in many other related languages among them Java C++ PHP and MySQL Now you personally might not use those other languages very often but many of us especially those who occasionally wear a devops hat do And if the code is not meant to be read by humans also then why are we not writing in assembly

I explained the logic: By having tooling and tests it place, I am protected against gotchas and I haven't ever encountered a problem. Thus, i do not advocate you must ommit semicolons. I am saying "it doesn't matter what you do" provided you have the tooling in place. Do whatever feels best, what you like, what you feel comfortable with.

And here is the upside: I've minimized the time I spend arguing about this detail with my colleagues to 0s. Because it doesn't matter :)

"It doesn't matter" really is the perfect summation of this.

We have tooling that can solve this to prevent pointless bike shedding.

Exactly. I almost always use TS instead of JS, for example, which flags gotcha scenarios (which I usually rewrite to avoid) and inserts semicolons for me in the final code. It’s just noise in my source.

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