Bootstrap's maintainer hates the semicolon

Personal anecdote time: I've been writing Javascript for my job for about 16 months now. When I started, I read all the same material as the readers of this site probably did, mostly written by Crockford, advocating a certain brace/semicolon heavy style. But after dutifully following this for about 6 months, I started to notice that I had made many 'mistakes' in the code, to do with missing semis particularly, and so had a lot of other people in the company. Of course, all the code ran fine everywhere and nobody had noticed in 6 months.

So, when writing code for personal exploration at home, I stopped using semis. It's surprising how much time you spend making sure they are there when the interpreter won't check for their presence (and doesn't care either way). Issues can crop up to do with missing semis, but so far I haven't had a single issue, probably because i'm aware of avoiding certain things, like starting a line with a bracket.

So, in my personal experience, it hasn't mattered to have them or not. If you absolutely need them for minification or similar, you should be using a compiler like yui. You are going to make a mistake if your code base is large enough to matter, irrespective of how vigilant you are, so you might as well leave minutiae like this to a computer.

I know the semicolon insertion rules, because I'm obsessive-compulsive like that. In any team I lead, any software I write, and any open-source project I maintain, the coding standard will be "Terminate all your statements with semicolons."

Why? Because my job is to make less work for people, not more. I could give them a list of 4 rules, often each having a list of a half dozen+ tokens, and say "memorize these, or you're not a professional JavaScript programmer". Or I could say "Terminate your statements with semicolons", and there's one rule, the same as in many other languages, for them to memorize.

Other projects are free to do whatever they want with their coding standards, and if they want to make things complicated to show how 1337 they are or just because they think it looks pretty, fine. But of all the things you need to worry about to be a good frontend engineer, where to put the semicolons seems like the stupidest possible one.