Agreed. I spend most of my time writing non-semicolon languages like Ruby, Haskell, Scala, Elixir, Clojure, and Python. As a result, I never developed the semi-colon reflex that a lot of Algol-family language users built up. I constantly forget semi-colons even after all these years, and my own inability to remember annoys me.

I used to skip semicolons in JavaScript because I could never remember to include them. Using a linter with Emacs made it a non-issue; I get a warning in my editor immediately when I miss one.

PS: I'm really enjoying Rust, so maybe this will be the language that finally forces me to pick up the semi-colon habit.

I thought about that regarding semicolons, optional braces, newline placement, consistent placing of whitespace in general; then I decided having the machine tell me where I need to do more work is all very well and good, but what I really want is a program that will do the work for me instead. So I wrote one: https://www.npmjs.com/package/jsclean

Oh, there's plenty of punishment. Avoiding the punishment in the difficult part. And you can do that the easy way or the hard way.

We would all be better off if semi colons had just been required in JavaScript. The problem is that semi colons are not actually optional in JavaScript. Instead JavaScript use ASI, automatic semi colon invasion, where the compiler attempts to determine where semi colons should go. Unfortunately the rules are complex, prone to certain errors, and I can't rely on everyone I ever work with understanding all of those rules. For all of these reasons if you are writing JavaScript you should just use semi colons.

Well, semicolons may be optional in Python but the official python style strongly recommends agains (needing to use them)

It's not about forgetting them once in a while, it's about playing a game of "needs a semicolon or doesn't" which increases the (already high) number of things the developer needs to worry about

In Python you usually don't add semi-colons, and it will bark when your intention is unclear.

In javascript you may omit semicolons, but the interpreter will guess your intention when it is ambiguous and it will probably guess it wrong.

AFAIK the only "benefit" to semicolons is that you can put multiple statements on the same line.