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by LoonyPandora 5177 days ago 

    Now, this could be easily solved – by adding the friggin semicolon.
What this furore misses is that the original issue (JSMin failing to minify bootstrap-dropdown.js) was already fixed when the bug was raised [1]. Fixed without adding semicolons. Everyone should be happy with that. Developers of bootstrap got to stick to their "no semicolons" schtick, and the person with the original problem got it fixed. Everyone seems to forget this salient point when they rush in to this debate.

For reference, I sometimes use semicolons in my javascript, sometimes I don't. It depends on context and whether it makes the code more readable. It's not an issue I care enough about to get involved in a holy war, one only marginally more relevant than tabs vs spaces.

[1] https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/issues/3057#issuecommen...
1 comments
lucisferre 5177 days ago
That isn't really the original issue at all, Crockford's comment is just what brought it to a boilover. The lack of semi-colons has been brought up in issue after issue on the bootstrap project. Each time it's been rejected for the same arguably poor reasoning.

Christian's post is completely spot on here. Javascript was designed to be tolerant of errors and inconsistencies as much as it could. That fact however, shouldn't be used as an excuse for advocating inconsistent coding. Not that I'm saying semi-colons are the epitome of consistent coding (I prefer Ruby myself) but that Javascript was not designed with significant whitespace in mind, rather it just has a tolerance for inconsistent and arguably erroneous syntax.

The argument here is that we shouldn't let Javascript's tolerance excuse laxness on our parts. We should know better.

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LoonyPandora 5177 days ago
By "original issue", I was referring to the actual GitHub issue / bug report.

On the wider issue of semicolons I am in agreement of you, and all my own code is written with that in mind - though I respect the bootstrap authors preference and would style my pull requests without semicolons.

If their insistence on not using semicolons causes conflict with other popular software, I would hope they see sense and fix those conflicts - even if that meant adding a semicolon or two.

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