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Wow, that is the biggest pile of garbage I have ever read.

Half of this article is a strawman argument under the heading: "You can’t minify JavaScript code without semicolons"

I've never heard that argument in my life for using semicolons.

> Easy solution: when a line starts with parenthesis, prepend a semicolon to it.

Sweet! Something extra to remember because I chose not to use semicolons.

> My advice on JSLint: don’t use it. Why would you use it? If you believed that it helps you have less bugs in your code, here’s a newsflash; only people can detect and solve software bugs, not tools. So instead of tools, get more people to look at your code.

Are you kidding me? This has to be trolling. Our goal as programmers is to automate tasks and save people time. What kind of garbage is this?

I'm firmly on the no-semicolon camp, but I agree with the general sentiment of your comment.

>Half of this article is a strawman argument under the heading: "You can’t minify JavaScript code without semicolons" I've never heard that argument in my life for using semicolons.

This does unfortunately still happen. Even in this HN discussion, it's been brought up. Nowadays, every minifier follows proper ASI semantics. Concatenation is something you need to be careful of, but that's more of a general thing that has nothing to do with whether or not semicolons are used. Joining files with ";\n" and wrapping contents in IIFEs work well.

> Sweet! Something extra to remember because I chose not to use semicolons.

A linter can catch this for you, so you don't actually have to remember anything. Regardless, it's a simple rule: Prepend a semi-colon to lines that start with '[' or '('. This is much simpler and less noisy than "Put a semi-colon in most places that terminate a statement".

More importantly though, I'd say that ASI rules are something everyone should be aware of, regardless of whether or not one chooses to use semicolons.

> Are you kidding me? This has to be trolling. Our goal as programmers is to automate tasks and save people time. What kind of garbage is this?

Agreed. JSLint in particular is quite rigid, so I'd avoid using it, but ESLint is a fine alternative that can be configured to check for both semicolon and semicolon-free styles.