Crockford on Bootstrap's semicolon omission: “insanely stupid code”

Simplicity should win; but alas, being one of the cool kids is more important.

Here is what I see:

@fat is not inserting "!" needlessly as a statement separator. The "!" is there for its proper purpose, as a "unary not" operation, which will short circuit the second operand of the "&&" when isActive is false.

Given that, @fat has left out a semicolon in a way that is perfectly legitimate based on this language specification, at least as described in the 5.1 version linked from here: http://inimino.org/~inimino/blog/javascript_semicolons).

Could @fat have written the code differently so that he would have been required to include the ";"? Perhaps -- but I don't see why that counterfactual has any particular bearing here.

Crockford's own page on JSMin http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html> claims: "JSMin is a filter that omits or modifies some characters. This does not change the behavior of the program that it is minifying."

The fact is that @fat's code is legal code and JSMin is breaking it.

IMHO, Crockford is ignoring the technical matters at hand. @fat cannot be faulted for writing code that complies with the specification and for having a reasonable expectation that code minimizers will preserve the semantics of his legal code. Crockford (and others) may wish that the language specification did not include automatic semicolon insertion because it does hamper making changes in the language without breaking existing code -- but that does not make this piece of code "insanely stupid".

Yes, forward progress on the language would be better served if automatic semicolon insertion rules weren't in the specification. However, calling one particular piece of code that leverages those rules "insanely stupid" and refusing to acknowledge that JSMin is in fact breaking the semantics of the code is not productive. Refusing to fix this in JSMin does not somehow make the problem with the specification to go away.

My point is that its stupid to use a tool on code it was not written to support. If you want minification with valid JavaScript, use something like Uglify-js.

If you write code, however, that works with JSMin, then use that tool. Douglass Crockford can write his software to work any way he likes and support any code he likes. Don't like it? Use something else, and don't be stupid.

Scrolled through, won't participate. I'd much rather build interesting application.