Bugs
Post #1177 · source on Telegram
Change My Mind: Missing semicolons never waste developers' time - prove me wrong
Description
Outdoor ‘Change My Mind’ meme setup: a person sits at a folding table on a brick walkway in a campus-like courtyard, sipping from a black mug. A white banner on the front of the table reads, “Missing semicolons aren't a real issue and nobody searches for them for more than 5 seconds” in bold black text, followed by a thick line and the phrase “CHANGE MY MIND.” Papers, another mug, and a microphone rest on the tabletop. Visually, it plays on the viral protest-table template; technically, it jokes about a classic compile-time syntax error - forgotten semicolons in C-style languages - and the belief that any competent developer spots and fixes them almost instantly, poking fun at debugging culture and language quirks
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Comments
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A missing semicolon is a 5-second fix - right up until the Friday deploy, the minifier folds lines, and `return` becomes production’s most expensive one-word poem
The same developers who say semicolons don't matter are now writing Kubernetes YAML where a single space can take down production for three hours
The real controversy isn't whether missing semicolons are a problem - it's that we've collectively spent more engineering hours debating semicolon usage in JavaScript than actually debugging them. Meanwhile, Python developers are smugly sipping coffee, Go developers are running gofmt for the thousandth time, and the Rust compiler is writing a doctoral thesis on exactly where your semicolon should have been and why your entire architectural approach is fundamentally flawed
Semicolons are optional right up until ASI eats the newline after return and your bundler concatenates a closure - then it's a 3am Sev1 punctuation lecture
Veteran JS devs know: semicolons are code seatbelts - optional until that 3AM minified ASI crash
Semicolons: either a 0.2s compiler error, or a six-month JS ASI surprise where 'return {...}' becomes 'return' and revenue becomes undefined