Of parser-fetishists and semi-colons

Surely the language is precisely what the spec says it is?

"The parser is the spec" is a nasty design smell, IMO.

Add the semicolon

"but but but" add the semicolon

There's so much FOR it, it's unbelievable. Yes, it's good to 'break the rules' now and then. Add the semicolon

This is not about if JS allows it or not. It's important, but mostly irrelevant.

You can also not add 'var' to JS variables unless needed. That's going to be a lot of fun when it goes wrong.

But here are the million dollar questions:

1 - How much time is spent making it work without a semicolon as opposed to just typing it? This is not about typing ';' - time for that is irrelevant, but the mental effort of doing so 2 - How much time will it be wasted to fix minifiers (that is, add to them the intricacies of no-semi colon parsing and probably having to write a whole different parser) 3 - How much mental effort is needed to comprehend and correctly fix non semicolon code

Number 3 is the biggest issue and if you don't believe me it goes by another name: coding standard

Yes, JS works without semicolons. And yes, C works without indenting, without meaningful names to variables, etc.

It's not about "to write JS you should know all the nitty-gritty rules of the language and you're stupid if you don't know them so you just add semicolons". It's about teamwork, and facilitating code comprehension (and maintenance).

And language designers make mistakes. They don't know if a feature is going to become a trap, irrelevant to 99% of developers (and with an easy workaround) or just a pain in the behind.

All the people arguing that the code as was presented should is good and right, I present this:

Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you are as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? ~Brian Kernighan

I couldn't tell that the second line in the code in question was an if statement at first without actually thinking about it. How is that helpful?

Agreed!

It amazes me how much time people have spent arguing over this.

When I see an open source library that's not coded in the way I like, I either customize it to my liking or look for alternatives.

The only time I would really care about someone's programming style is when I work with them, otherwise live and let live.

Haven't yet seen anyone point out what unpleasantly quirky code this was in the first place:

    !isActive && $parent.toggleClass('open')

It should have been written like this:

    if (!isActive) {
         $parent.toggleClass('open');
    }

What if somebody needs to add a second bit of code to be executed if isActive is false? In the first case, they'd have to refactor the code into an if statement before adding it. It should have been an if statement in the first place.

If you want something to happen if something is true, then you should use an if statement. This is not controversial stuff. Don't look for "clever" ways to misappropriate other parts of the syntax in order to appeal to your own personal minimalist aesthetic taste. Be cooperative.

Edit: On re-reading this it comes off as preachy. In fact I've very recently taken a closer look at some of my own "little quirks" and realised how unhelpful they were for other developers. I guess I'm embarrassed about that and want to spread the embarrassment around.