Technology

85299 readers

4397 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related news or articles.
Be excellent to each other!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots

founded 3 years ago

MODERATORS

L3s@lemmy.world

enu@lemmy.world

technopagan@lemmy.world

L4s@lemmy.world

L3s@hackingne.ws

JavaScript - To Semicolon, Or Not To Semicolon; (emnudge.dev)

submitted 5 days ago by lemmydividebyzero@reddthat.com to c/technology@lemmy.world

13 comments fedilink hide all child comments

top 13 comments

sorted by: hot top controversial new old

[–] Dirk@lemmy.ml 9 points 5 days ago (1 children)

tl;dr

If you ever need to start a line with parens or brackets, consider using a ; right before it, as so many have adopted. Although, there is rarely a case where this would become a necessity.

[–] Azzu@leminal.space 21 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Tl;dr: just put a semicolon at the end, and you never need to think, this is just not really worth it

[+] Deestan@lemmy.world -21 points 4 days ago (2 children)

Shitting on people "thinking too much" is the most destructive attitude you can have in software development. That is how we build real skills. It doesn't matter if your opinion is that the thing being used to exercise on is weird or useless.

[–] graynk@discuss.tchncs.de 29 points 4 days ago (1 children)

No, talking about semicolons and tabs and spaces for the umpteenth time is not how we build real skills, and you shouldn't waste your time "thinking" about it. You should run a linter that will format it for you and you should choose formatting rules that everyone working on the codebase in the future would be mostly OK with. Splitting hairs about when to insert a semicolon ain't it.

[–] Azzu@leminal.space 12 points 4 days ago (2 children)

To expand on this: Ideally you would work in a language you didn't have these inane rules about semicolons, like the article is obviously good and correct, but it's just not something that anyone should have to think about, it doesn't lead to better programs.

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago (2 children)

There's a lot of room for criticism of JavaScript, but this ain't it.

Just use semicolons at the end of a statement and it's simple. There are only inane rules about it if you're trying to skip semicolons, and why the fuck should anyone bother with that?

[–] Azzu@leminal.space 2 points 4 days ago

The inane thing is being able to skip semicolons. Exactly, why should anyone bother with that. We wouldn't have this conversation. So yes, this is valid criticism of JavaScript, it's not a very important one at all, but still.

[–] wholookshere@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

You say thats not valid criticism, but yet I can't think of another language that has a debate over semicolons.

Maybe that's just me not be exposed in my career to more ones like that, and there are still petty squables in every language yes.

But the fact you have to have the second paragraph, and defend it, is the problem your replying to. something so core to a language like line ending syntax, is figured out in all other laugauges. You don't have to mentally be prepared to unfril that layer of syntax.

rabbles in statically typed laguages

[–] Serinus@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

There's no debate. You've made it up.

[–] very_well_lost@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Ideally you would work in a language you didn't have these inane rules about semicolons

I wish I had the luxury of not working with JavaScript... but sadly it's still the only game in town on the web.

[–] Azzu@leminal.space 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

There are languages that compile into JS or WebAssembly, might be worth to look at that. I like Clojurescript, but others are also good.

[–] Azzu@leminal.space 11 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

If you desire to interpret my comment as "shitting on people", that is your prerogative. However, that is not how I meant it.

Thinking about things is great, and that opinion is actually contained in my comment, if you look closely: I want people to think, just not about things that aren't really worth it.

The article is great, thinking about this in general is great, you just don't want your future to be spent making decisions about where to place semicolons, that is not a beneficial use of one's time. Without that thinking about where to place semicolons, you're free to think about more useful topics.

[–] darklamer@feddit.org 5 points 4 days ago

This is wonderfully bizarre, but informative, I had actually wondered what exactly the rules were.