Local meetup meltdown over semicolons, still not sure who was right

Last month at the beginner coding meetup in Pittsburgh, this guy named Marcus showed a 40-line script and said he never uses semicolons because JavaScript handles it. Then this other lady, I think her name was Priya, stood up and said that's how you get bugs in production, and she pushed back hard. They went back and forth for like 15 minutes, and the organizer had to step in. I get that modern tools auto-insert them, but for a beginner like me, which is the better habit to learn first, always typing semicolons or relying on the engine? I've been using semicolons since day one, but now I'm questioning if I'm wasting time or actually building a safer foundation. Has anyone else been through this debate at a group event and landed on a clear answer?

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the_ben15d ago

Nobody in that room seems to have brought up the real issue, which is that the debate is way smaller than it feels. If you're a beginner, the habit that matters more is reading other people's code and not getting thrown off by whatever style they use. Semicolons are a crutch in a way, but so is pretending ASI is some magic safety net, both styles break in edge cases. The clearer way to think about it is your own future debugging time. When you open a file six months from now and something's acting weird, do you want to be guessing whether a missing semicolon caused it or not? Honestly, typing three characters takes about half a second, and it removes a whole category of "wait, why did this do that" moments. Marcus and Priya were both right and both wrong, they were arguing about style when they should've been talking about consistency within a team. Whatever you pick, just pick one and stick with it for a while, and learn to read the other style without getting annoyed.