Of the sustained debates, I feel it is tied with the "my nosql is better than yours" debate. Both of them seem to boil down to "understand your tools, your use case may not map to the thing someone else is advocating for their use case".
But, to suggest that simply removing semicolons constitutes some grand gesture towards readability, simplicity, or something as grandiose as a "minimalist aesthetic," is...beyond absurd.
It is Bike Shedding Qua Bike Shedding.
"We have met the enemy, and he is us."
hahaha - I feel the best use of this thread is that we agree to spawn a series of blog posts debating the most boring debates to hit HN ever. Including sock-puppets to randomly drop surprise left turns like "no you are all wrong, here is why the ocaml vs haskell debate bores me" and "no, the real boredom is the long comment threads in the ongoing 'anarco-socialist' vs 'enlightened-libertarian' viewpoint wars"
:)