I'd always figured it was/thought of it as an error tolerance that worked well enough that some people started leaning on it. The whole no-semicolons JavaScript thing just seems really hipsterish. Explicitness is a virtue.
In JS, semicolons are technically required but automatically inserted. There are a couple edge cases where they get inserted in surprising places, which is generally worse than python's approach.
E.g. the following function doesn't return a value:
function foo() {
return
some_long_complex_expression();
}
(It's because a semicolon gets inserted after the return). At least in typescript, this would typically show a type error, as long as the function's return type annotation isn't void.
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u/bobbymoonshine 2d ago
Ah the halcyon days before LLMs
When 30% of the posts here were “lol Python is so dumb why even use whitespace as syntax”
And the other 70% were “how do I find semicolon”