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.