this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2025
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i would say why would you just not to
isAdmin = truebut i also worked with someone who did just this so i'll instead just sigh.also the real crime is the use of javascript tbh
That's TypeScript. I can tell by the pixels defining a type above.
Was looking at it and could not figure out why their weren't any semicolon's.
Neither Javascript nor Typescript require semicolon, it is entirely a stylistic choice except in very rare circumstances that do not come up in normal code.
Explanation for nerds
The reason is the JS compiler removes whitespace and introduces semicolons only "where necessary".So writing
Is not the same as
Because the compiler will see that and make it:
You big ol' nerd. Tee-hee.
That's terrifying, especially in JS where no type system will fuck you up for returning nothing when you should've returned a boolean.
Common JavaScript L
Not wrong, but funnily enough, it's a linting rule win. I'd go nuts if I didn't have my type checks and my linters. My current L, though, is setting up the projects initially and dealing with the configuration files if I raw dog it, but that's a problem with ESLint configs and the ecosystem as a whole having to deal with those headaches. So in the end, the JS devs got clever and shifted the blame to the tooling. 😅
That's good to know. Don't know how I didn't know this. Been writing JS since 2000. Always just used them I guess. Ecmascripts look funny to me without them
Fair enough, I like it better without but I don't have a strong preference and have no issue adapting to whatever the style of the repo is.
I learned about it researching tools to automatically enforce formatting style and came across StandardJS, which eliminates them by default.
I can see the benefit of matching style when working with others. I only code for myself and never had to worry about conformity for project consistency.
It is good to learn new things.
I'm sure I have some coding habitats that would annoy others.
Consistent styling helps make the actual meaningful changes easier to spot. Probably also useful for your own commit history when working solo in a repo, but most useful in a team, yeah!
Same here. My brain interprets them as one long run-on sentence and throws a parsing error.
Hmm, a webdev colleague said he'd normally prefer without semicolons, but used them anyways for better compile errors.
Interesting, I'm not aware of any way they would affect compile errors. I'd be curious to know more.
I don't have experience with how it affects JavaScript specifically, but independent of programming language, it usually removes the guesswork where the error might be.
The thing is that compilers use fairly static rules for their grammar. So, even if you just typo a comma where there should've been a dot, then its grammar rules don't match anymore and it doesn't really know what to do with your code.
To some degree, it's possible to say certain symbols just cannot appear in a specific place, but especially with a comma, it could be the start of the next element in a list, for example.
Without semicolons, it's likely going to tell you that something's wrong between somewhere before your typo and the next closing brace (
}). With semicolons, it can generally pinpoint the specific statement where the comma is wrong.This should also make analysis quicker while you're editing the code, as it only has to check one statement (or two, if you're inserting a new line and haven't typed the semicolon yet).