[Almaviva]

There's a principled point about aesthetics and removing unnecessary redundancy. But that shouldn't be confused with whether semicolons affect your ability to think about code. Really I can't imagine how someone could be significantly distracted by semicolons, once they're used to a language, to the extent that it occupies their conscious brain in any way whatsoever. It does take familiarity to get there, but I can't imagine having a mind where this didn't seem transparent and rather irrelevant very quickly.

[nuclearsandwich]

You're absolutely right, I spent most of the past three years writing Java, C++, C, and C# and they all use semicolons and I certainly forgot about them whilst coding in those langs. But the penalty is in transitioning between languages that use or don't use those features. When I'm writing in C and the like, I tend to stick within that language. But with JavaScript and Ruby, I do a lot more context switching back and forth. Anything I can do to reduce the penalty of moving between one and the other is worth doing in my opinion. Especially when it doesn't affect the final result.