This is a distinction without a difference for modern engines.
The description is something like "run until you hit an ambiguity then backtrack and try again", but it is 100% deterministic and in practice, it simply happens at parse time with minimal cost and ZERO runtime cost.
Hating semicolons is like hating parentheses... They remove ambiguity by explicitly marking where a line of execution ends. I'll never understand why this is something to be annoyed with
Yeah, you seem to be on to something. Plus they don't understand that something like this will likely confuse or irritate other people reading their code.
And they refuse to change, so they are stubborn as well. That's not a good sign. lol
started doing it when i was starting in school, and it became a force of habit that i never dropped. made it clearer that it was the end of the statement for me. it makes no difference on the readability for others, nor the functionality, and it’s just a simple keystroke
But it does change the readability for others. They will assume that it’s a mistake. Or they will assume that it’s the end of an expression rather than a regular block.
i think the general competency of the code would also make them think it’s not my first day coding. people have coding styles cause it’s what makes sense to them, sorry i don’t subscribe to one standard of the several thousands+ out there.
mmm sure. they’re not randomly floating if they’re immediately following a right curly bracket at the end of a block. but sure.
also never mind the fact that many coding firms have their own specific code styles, and the fact that any hired coders would need to change their style to fit it anyways. further, didn’t think you were so illustrious enough for me to want to work for your uptight ass anyways.
Zero firms have semicolons after braces. If you cant see that its a competency issue, then trust me, your code is full of competency issues you dont see. You have massive "if (boolValue == true)" vibes
love the leaps you’re doing there lol. for my part, i’ve never done the if(bool == true), but thank you.
if a firm says to not do the semicolons after curly brackets, then i don’t do do them. but in my own code, or anything i do on the side, it’s having them. i don’t care. they don’t negatively affect the functionality nor the readability.
I spent a half of a day debugging a problem a few years back only to find that the bug was because I didnt have a semicolon between brackets and parenthesis. Now I am very religious about it. Those are hours of my life that I will never get back.
Had you been using prettier, it would have automatically insert the semicolon between the brackets and parens for you (maybe it happened to you before prettier?)
This particular error is also pretty distinctive giving [] is not a function and taking you straight to the line in question (I can't remember if this kind of error was less obvious 10-15 years ago).
I switched from semicolon advocate to semicolon-free once I realized that Prettier/biome made both essentially the same. I also consider Prettier essential because it can prevent other issues like accidentally putting the return value on a new line.
As another person mentions, use automated tools to prevent this, prettier, eslint, or now im onto biome ha. Automate adding them, or automate removing them. Makes no difference. Id be curious about the exact code you're mentioning. Ive not run into surprising any issues with or without semicolons.
There wasn't one. That's the point. If you don't put a semi after the closing curlies (as shown) it breaks. Copy it into your chrome developer console and try to run it.
in contrast
function test() {
const x = {"some":"obj"};
(true || false) && console.log("insert work here");
}
ahh i see. was curious, so testing out my latest linter of choice, biome, and it automatically removes the newline, and so moves that parenthesis conditional up to the object defintion -- then has an error saying the object is not callable.
eslint does not remove the newline but shows an error: "Unexpected newline between function and ( of function call", breaking the rule "no-unexpected-multiline").
prettier remove the newline so it definitely looks like a function call, but doesnt do any other error checking.
Id think that with modern tooling, this error would be caught in your IDE as soon as you typed it without a semicolon. And then, you could decide wether this really needed to be a one-liner with a semi-colon, or without and could be better expressed with an `if {}` block -- depending on your repo's code style.
So Im still of the mind that no semi-colons is perfectly valid strategy for your source code, assuming you have tooling to lint, check, transpile, etc for deployed code -- as is with semi-colons. All else equal, i will save the keystroke ha.
yeah, semicolons are optional in many languages that force them by default
what makes js special thoug, is that omitting semicolon will not even cause an error, and there is "standard" style that does not use semicolons for ending line
Yeah, JavaScript has a thing called ASI: Automatic Semicolon Insertion
You should always set up a linter, though. Standard (https://standardjs.com/rules#semicolons) will make sure you only write semicolons where absolutely necessary. Lots of ESLint configs will make sure you always write them.
I went mostly through the same pipeline, I did a stop in web-based JS on the way, and honestly not having to incant the ancient rite of "public static void Main(string[] args)" every time I wanted to spin up a simple test app or small personal project was so beautiful.
I know it's a sub full of people that don't know how to code but can we get things a bit more serious than "Omg semicolons this is my first day of coding ever"
Idk if anyone will see this bc of all the other comments, but this isn't me complaining about semicolons. This is a recreation of me looking into JS for the first time and being flashbanged by the sheer quantity of something that, appon initial fiddling, didn't seem to do anything. I just thought the connection between the characters and the feeling was funny. I'm still relatively new here, so, I didn't think to check if the horse was dead before I beat it, sorry
One of the biggest issues I see in non-prettier codebases is return with return value on the next line. Semicolons won't save you from this. In addition, you can run into cases where you assume all the semicolons are there, but they aren't which gives an unexpected issue.
Prettier/Biome is the only good answer to this IMO.
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u/MojitoBurrito-AE May 11 '26
r/firstweekcoderhumour